I have a love-hate relationship with my bedding on laundry day. On one hand, compared to main laundry loads, there’s less to hang up, so throwing it on the airer takes seconds versus half an hour. But at the same time, there’s a lot more wrestling involved as I try to untangle the embedded knots and dig into duvet cover corners to reach a rogue sock or two.
Tangled bedding is one of those laundry-day woes we accept and endure, but what if I were to tell you there’s a way to beat it? And not just in stopping tangles but preventing lost socks, balled-up wadding – the lot. Here’s a speedy 2-second fix that will put your bedsheet-wrestling days behind you.
Why do bedsheets tangle in the laundry?
While you might be shocked by the tangled mess that comes out of the drum, the result’s not surprising when you think about it. Each time the washing machine or tumble dryer tumbles, the load is tossed in on itself, so anything large and enveloping, such as a bedsheet, gets wrapped around the other contents.
If there’s a duvet cover, a pillowcase or anything with open ‘pockets’, there’s a good chance that smaller items will get caught up and can get pushed into the pocket and ‘lost’ by the end of the cycle.
As smaller items are ‘consumed’, you can easily end up pulling out one huge, wet sheet or duvet cover when the time comes to unload, with everything else sitting inside it. This problem can cause your washing machine to lose balance and fail to spin (one of the red flags to keep an eye out for with your washing machine). As the weighty mass is tossed across the drum, the machine starts thrashing around alongside it, which can do serious damage to your floor. Breaking the wad apart and reloading the machine with a reduced number of items afterwards can fix this and help it pick up spin speed safely.
The sheer force involved during the washing machine’s spin cycle locks and knots already twisted items together. The centrifugal force pushes the load to the outside of the drum, where the tangles are compressed and bedsheets can end up sealed around whatever they’ve consumed.
What fix stops bedsheets from tangling?
We all know about doing up the buttons to stop duvet covers from ‘eating’ the rest of the load. This works, but it’s annoying and time consuming. And even with this extra effort, tangling is still a problem. So, what can be done? The answer can be found in your beauty cabinet…
A bedsheet will tangle in the drum because it’s such a large and open item, with plenty of material to ball up with other laundry. We can’t reduce the amount of material, but we can better contain it so it’s less likely to catch and knot. There are products available that can hold the four corners of your sheets together to do the job, such as the Wad-Free Bed Sheet Detangler.
By holding the four corners of the sheet together, it’s less liable to spread, tangle and envelop other items in the load. In doing this, it also better prevents the load from becoming one massive wad of laundry and losing balance as it attempts to spin.
But, if you’re looking around the house for a makeshift tool that will do a similar job, we recommend using a hair tie. You can use a fabric hair tie to hold all four corners of the sheet together in the same way as the above tool. You will need to tie it tight to stop it from coming loose in the wash, but it will effectively deter tangling, wadding and the enveloping of smaller items. Plus, you get the bonus of washing your hair tie at the same time as the sheet, which is one of many filthy things we forget to clean.
However, this technique is not suitable for the dryer – it’s for washing machines only. The high heat will shrink and warp the hair tie. So, if you want to reap the benefits here, you’d need to either invest in a suitable tool, such as the one mentioned above or, if you’re willing to take the risk, stick to a low temperature cycle.
Other effective ways to stop bedsheets tangling
- Shake out the load before adding to the washing machine or dryer to break it up
- Avoid overloading the washing machine or dryer drum, which encourages knots
- Wash and dry smaller items separately so they can’t get lost
- Invest in dryer balls, which knock items apart as they bounce around the dryer
