What is Wetcleaning?
Wetcleaning is a process that uses water as the solvent. That is where the similarity to “home washing” ends.
In wetcleaning, the chemistry is different than with “home washing”. Each garment is analyzed to select the appropriate water temperature, agitation, selection of chemistry (detergents, sizings, conditioners) and selection of how to dry the garment.
With the different chemistry, and other factors, this eliminates or minimizes any shrinkage.
Why use wetcleaning?
Some garments cannot be drycleaned. Many are labeled with a machine wash or hand wash label and would be damaged by drycleaning. These can be successfully wetcleaned. Other times, dryclean only garments will have stains on them that will not respond to drycleaning alone for removal and can be successfully removed in wetcleaning. Examples of this is when a drink (coffee, Kool-Aid, tea, etc.) is spilled all over a white wool skirt for example. Or a person gets sick and vomits onto their garment. Many of these stains are what we call water soluble (versus solvent soluble), and so the use of water aids in the removal of the stains. BUT if the garment was put in un-treated and unconditioned water, dyes could bleed, garment could shrink and felt, garment could get a hard feeling, this is avoided with proper wetcleaning chemistry. The goal of fabricare is to return the garment back to the consumer in the cleanest possible manner that is safe for the garment that removes all the removable stains and spots.
Don’t all drycleaners wetclean?
It is true that drycleaners do use water to aid in the removal of water soluble stains, not all drycleaners have the necessary chemistry, procedures/equipment and training to do wetcleaning. At One Hour Cleaners, one of our staff members has been trained by the Drycleaning and Laundry Institute, the world wide association of Drycleaners, Wetcleaners and Launderers in wetcleaning. Without the proper chemistry, procedures and training, the results can be disastrous.
While many cleaners might have one wetcleaning detergent, we have 4 or 5 different ones, so that we can more closely match the needs of the garment to the proper detergent and conditioners.