How to Clean Your Clothes of Mold After Living in a Moldy House

Why is it important to clear your clothes of mold? Clothes are a source of contamination that you need to address in order to fully heal from CIRS. Even after you move from a moldy environment to a healthy environment, if you do not clean your clothes properly, you bring mold and thus reactivity with you. I was ignorant of how to clean my families clothes properly until I met a good friend who’d been down the journey before me. I hope you can learn from this post to help your family heal.

Cleaning clothes, bedding, etc of mold spores is not as simple as washing them in the laundry machine.  Cleaning your clothes with both EC3 laundry additive and an ozone water producing machine, like PureWash is important because it kills off all mold spores and mycotoxins and keeps them from following you everywhere.

The PureWash is quite easy to set up attached to the laundry machine; the ozone water is important to kill off the mold spores. Make sure to wash clothes with both EC3 laundry additive and ozone water for at least the first few cycles to totally rid your clothes of mold spores. In the long run, you can use the ozone water alone to keep your clothes clean, unless it’s a particularly dirty load. Ozone water is definitely most cost effective.

The EC3 laundry additive is most beneficial to rid clothes of mycotoxins, although it helps with mold spores, so that’s why EC3 laundry additive and ozone water work so well together. The EC3 laundry additive alone does not clean clothes enough to purify moldy clothes after living in a moldy house. EC3 laundry additive is useful when you are on trips and don’t have access to ozone water though.

Things we learned while experimenting with our PureWash:

1) The first 2 months, the PureWash caused a large release of mycotoxins into the air during laundry loads. At first I thought it was the PureWash off gassing ozone, but I soon learned that the ozone water was actually breaking down the mold spores in the clothes (and also breaking down the mold in my moldy laundry drain pipe) and causing this release of mycotoxins. I’d walk into the laundry room and it was the mycotoxins which repulsed me. I started lighting an EC3 Air Purification Candle while doing laundry and it made a huge difference. I could walk in the room with no problems then.

2) If your laundry machine is a single washer and dryer like many European models and collects lint in the wash basin, make sure to clean the lint out regularly. That lint was collecting in ours and causing mytotoxin problems for us while doing laundry. Now that we clean it out regularly, I do not have an aversion to the laundry room.

3) The PureWash has a minor off gassing smell, although it’s tolerable as long as the above 2 considerations are met. I just close the laundry room door and it’s no problem. I can go in and out of the laundry room and the off gassing doesn’t cause problems.

On a side note, we set up our Purewash with a water hose also to make buckets of ozone water to put down drains and keep them mold free. You can also soak toys etc in ozone water, which works well. A side note: if you haven’t cleaned out all the sink traps including kitchen sink, garbage disposal, even laundry machine drain pipe, do this first.

For more info related to cleaning pipes with ozone water, check out my previous blog Do you need a perfect house to heal from CIRS?