5 Things to Know Before Sending Your Laundry for Dry Cleaning
Laundry has for many years been a common household activity. However, with the busy lifestyle in Singapore, handling of piles of dirty clothes is increasing becoming a burden for many households. This has seen the use of professional laundry services increase significantly. This demand for convenience in laundry cleaning has also seen an increased popularity of laundry pickup as well as delivery services. Nonetheless, there are a few pointers and laundry tips you need to keep at the back of your mind before you send your laundry for dry cleaning.
What is Dry Cleaning?
The difference between dry and wet clean is not well known by a number of people. Knowing this difference will help you in understanding how you should handle and clean the variety of garments in your wardrobe. In wet cleaning, one uses water and soap in the cleaning process. Contrary to popular belief that dry cleaning means not using any liquid to clean, the process actually utilizes a unique chemical solvent to do the cleaning. Garments that are cleaned using this process are usually very delicate and would be distorted by the water treatment of wet cleaning. Dry cleaning prevents discoloration, fabric shrinkage and distortion.
The Dry cleaning Process
There are four significant stages involved in dry cleaning.
Stain removal stage involves stain identification, pre-treatment and stain removal.
The dry cleaning stage involves the actual cleaning. The garments are dipped into the solvent (perchlorethylene is the solvent mostly used) and washed thoroughly.
Post-spotting stage entails the spotting and removal of any stubborn stain that remained after the dry cleaning.
The finishing stage comprises of removal of creases by ironing and folding the garment.
The Garments to Dry Clean
As mentioned earlier, dry cleaning is necessary for specific garments, those with delicate fabric. It is imperative that you are able to identify the fabrics that require this special cleaning process. Most cloths have clothing tags indicating how the cloths should be handled. If a cloth requires dry cleaning the tag will read ‘dry clean only’. However, not all garments come with such instructions.
There are five main fabrics that one should look out for:
Cloths with more than 60% of silk require dry cleaning due to the delicate silk fiber that can easily be distorted.
Muslin or Cotton Voile tends to tear if not handled carefully.
Soft leather and suede can prove to be problematic especially if it gets stained.
Cashmere is not rugged hence the best way to keep it clean is dry cleaning it.
Sequins, Embroidery and beaded garment represent fine art and dry cleaning offers the best chance of keeping such garments clean without destroying the art.
How to Save Money
While the professional laundry services completely eliminate the hassle of doing laundry, you need to reduce your monthly laundry expenses and save some money while at it. There are a few dry cleaning, laundry tips you could use to maintain your laundry costs at a minimum. In Singapore, most of the laundry companies offer free services as well as discounts. Free services include repairing hems, sewing torn clothes, zippers and button. Instead of going to a tailor, you could simply take your clothes for dry cleaning and get your clothes repaired with experts at no additional costs. By being a loyal customer to a particular laundry company, you will be able to enjoy great discount offers. In Singapore, most companies will return your clean clothes with hangers. Let the hangers you receive accumulate to a significant number then go to the laundry company with the hangers and you will be sure to get a discount.
These are quite practical laundry tips that will enable you save your money.
Choosing the Right Laundry Company
Since the demand for professional laundry services increased, there has been a mushrooming of laundry companies. You can find numerous of companies online, but getting the right company might prove a challenge with so many companies around.
There are a number of standard operating procedures and details that you should be on the lookout for:
During the laundry collection, the pricing advice should be made after a preliminary laundry count and check.
The invoice should entail your name, contact, address, items collected and the date of return.
The soiled cloths should be checked against in the invoice.
On the date of return, you should be contacted before the delivery. If you are out of reach, the laundry should be kept at the laundry company for safekeeping.
If the laundry company you chose follows the above procedure, then you are in the right hands and if become a loyal customer you will benefit from numerous offers and discount.
