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What Is Dry Cleaning Birmingham Al

Here at Dry Clean City of Vestavia Hills, we post garment care tips to help you keep your wardrobe looking it’s best. Today we are posting information about how dry cleaning is done.

What Is Dry Cleaning?

Dry Cleaning is really not dry, it’s wet! That’s right, it’s wet. It’s called dry cleaning because the cleaning is done without the use of water. The cleaning is done with a dry cleaning solvent that, just like water, gets your garments wet. The solvent permeates the fibers in your garments and loosens the dirt, grime, grease, cosmetics, etc, from your garments during the dry cleaning process in a dry cleaning machine. Dry clean solvent cleans garments without expanding the fibers in the garments like water does. The fiber expanding properties of water can cause the fabric to shrink and dry cleaning solvent does not expand the fibers and thus, will not cause the fabric to shrink.

The garments are sorted by color, stains are pretreated with the appropriate spotting chemicals, and then up to 50 garments of similar fabric and color are loaded into the drum of a dry cleaning machine. The machine is activated and the dry cleaning solvent in the tank below is automatically pumped into the machine drum containing the garments. The activated cleaning cycle will then tumble the load of garments immersed in dry cleaning solvent to the right and then to the left repeatedly for 15 – 20 minutes to constantly move the garments around in the drum during the cleaning cycle while totally flushing the garments with the dry cleaning solvent as the solvent is filtered the entire time thru numerous charcoal filters that trap the dirt, grime, and excess dyes in the load. Once the cleaning cycle is finished, the drain cycle is activated and the machine drum will drain the filtered solvent back into the holding tank and then enter the high speed extraction cycle. This process extracts all of the excess dry cleaning solvent from the garments for approximately 5 minutes. Once the extraction cycle is completed, the garments are transferred to a machine called a Reclaimer.

The Reclaimer has a drum much like the dry cleaning machine that holds the load of garments during the process of removing the dry cleaning solvent from your garments by rotating back and forth to the right and then to the left for a period of approximately 45 minutes as the vaporization drum is heated to 140 degrees by the use of dry steam. The dry cleaning solvent is vaporized during this process to fully remove all traces of solvent from your garments. The garments are then removed from the reclaimer and inspected to find spots that may not have been removed in the dry cleaning process.

Unfortunately, many food spots, even though they were pretreated with spotting chemicals prior to dry cleaning, and then dry cleaned, will still be present on the garments. These spots will need to be treated with pressurized steam to attempt to remove them because the spots are water soluble and dry cleaning solvent may not have removed them.

We hope this helps you understand how dry cleaning is done.

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