It lies along the bottom of a door all season and never gets handled except to be shoved out of the way. Nobody thinks of it as laundry, because it is not clothing and it is not bedding, and there is no obvious moment at which it becomes dirty. But the entire reason it is there is that air moves through that gap, and air carries things with it. A fabric tube sitting in a moving stream of air is a filter whether anybody intended it to be one or not, and by spring there is a season of dust in the weave and a stale smell that a shake does not touch.
Where The Air Actually Goes
Warm air in a heated room rises and leaves at the top of the space, which lowers the pressure down near the floor and pulls cooler air in to take its place. The largest opening available for that replacement air is almost always the gap under a door, because it runs the full width of the doorway and nobody weatherstrips it. Most of the air traded between a cold entry and a warm room moves through that inch.
Air carries suspended material. Fine dust, lint shed off carpet, pet hair, soot drawn in from outdoors, and the mineral grit that comes in on shoes and gets ground to powder on a hard floor. When air passes through a porous fabric, the fabric captures a share of what is suspended in it, because the particles have inertia and the air can change direction around a fiber while the particle cannot. That is all a filter is.
So the tube does two jobs at once. It blocks most of the air, and it filters the part that still works its way through and around it. The material it holds is not evenly spread, either. It concentrates on the face turned toward the cold room and along the underside, which is the part nobody looks at and also the part that drags across the floor every time the door swings.
What Is Inside The Tube
Before anything gets wet, work out what the filling is, because the filling decides everything else. Squeeze along the length of it. Loose polyester fiberfill feels even and springy and shifts when you press it. A foam rod feels continuous and resists compression in one direction only. A granular fill moves like a liquid and makes a faint sound when you tip the tube from one end to the other.
Polyester fiberfill is washable and still troublesome. Wet polyester fibers slide past one another easily, so agitation packs them into dense nodules, and those nodules do not redistribute themselves as the tube dries. What comes out of the machine is lumpy, with thin patches at the ends, and the only real remedy is to open a seam, pull the filling out and separate it by hand.
A foam rod is worse in a different way. Open cell foam holds a very large volume of water, gives it up slowly, and gets compressed in a spin so the remaining water is driven into the middle of the rod. A foam core that never dries all the way through holds a stale smell indefinitely, and older polyurethane foam breaks down into crumbs whether it has ever been washed or not.
Granular fills cannot go in water at all. Rice and dried beans swell, soften and turn to paste. Sand becomes a dense slug that no drum will balance and that will tear the stitching under its own weight during a spin. Plastic pellets and glass beads survive the water but weigh enough to batter the machine around. If the fill is granular and the cover does not come off, the tube gets vacuumed and spot cleaned and nothing more.
The Cover And Its Casing
Check both ends and the long seam for a closure. A zipper, a drawstring, or a strip of hook and loop fastener means the cover comes off, and a removable cover changes the whole exercise, because then you are washing an ordinary piece of fabric and the filling stays dry on a shelf. A good many of the decorative versions are built this way and the owner never notices.
If there is a cord inside a casing anywhere on the cover, treat it carefully. A cotton cord inside a polyester or blend casing shrinks considerably more than the fabric around it does in a hot wash, because cotton loses more length as its fibers swell and relax than a synthetic ever does. The cord shortens, the casing has to gather up along it, and what you get is a permanently wavy edge.
There is no undoing that, because the cord is captive. Both ends are caught in the stitching, so there is nothing to pull on and nowhere for the gathered fabric to go. The same thing happens to a drawstring channel and to piping run along a seam. Washing cool is the entire protection, and it is worth a cool wash even when the cover looks sturdy enough to take anything.
Why Washing It Whole Goes Wrong
A long narrow tube in a drum does not tumble. It twists. The fabric wraps itself into a rope inside the first few minutes, and a rope moves as a single object, so all of the mechanical action lands on the outside of the twist while the inside sees almost no water at all. The dirtiest parts are generally the ones that end up buried in the middle of the rope.
The filling makes it worse by shifting the weight distribution as it moves. Fill that has migrated to one end turns the tube into an unbalanced load, which either slows the spin to nothing or sets the machine redistributing over and over, and every redistribution works the seams harder. A long tube with one heavy end is close to the worst shape you can hand a washer.
A tube full of dry dust should also not be wetted first. Dust plus water is mud, and mud driven down into a weave is far harder to shift than dry dust ever was. Taking the thing outside, shaking it out hard, and going over both faces with a vacuum and an upholstery tool removes most of the dry material before any water is involved. The wash is then left with only what is actually bound to the fiber.
Getting One Clean And Dry
If the cover comes off, wash it cool on a gentle cycle, on its own or with other flat items, and dry it flat or on low heat. If it does not come off and the fill is polyester, close any opening, put the tube inside a large mesh bag so it cannot rope up quite as badly, and run a cool gentle cycle with a low spin. Expect to redistribute the filling by hand afterward.
Drying is where a filled tube is most often rushed. The outside dries first while the core holds water, and a core that stays damp is where the stale smell comes back from. Hang the tube over a rail so its whole length is exposed and air can move along it, or lay it flat and turn it over every few hours. Judge it by weight in the hand rather than by how the surface feels.
Then keep up with it. Dry dust comes away with a vacuum in seconds and is close to impossible to remove once it has been wetted and ground in. Running the upholstery tool along both faces whenever the floor gets vacuumed is the one habit that keeps draft excluders out of the state this article describes, and it means the cover only needs a proper wash a couple of times a season.
Door Gaps In Dundalk Winters
Dundalk sits in damp air for much of the year, and damp air is why a stale smell is the usual complaint here rather than visible dirt. Fiber that holds moisture holds it longest where the filling is thickest, and a tube lying against a cold floor stays cooler than the room around it, which means it stays damper. Draft excluders in a humid climate need drying through properly, not simply drying.
Winter brings the other half of the problem. Grit and salt tracked in at a door end up on the floor directly beneath the gap, which is precisely where the tube lies. That material is abrasive, and it works into the weave on the underside and cuts fiber from within every time the door sweeps the tube across it. A cover that wears through along the bottom first has usually been sanded rather than worn out.
A long fabric tube is awkward in a household drum and worse in a household dryer. WaveMAX Dundalk is at 1774 Merritt Blvd, easy to reach from Dundalk and the surrounding area, and a large drum gives a long piece enough room to move instead of roping up, while a large dryer lets it tumble open along its whole length rather than folding over on itself.
The Awkward Shaped Things
Odd shaped soft furnishings are what a household machine handles worst. They are long, they are unevenly weighted, and they need room to move rather than a tight drum to twist inside. Our large capacity washers and dryers give a long filled tube space to open right out, which is the difference between a rinse that reaches the middle and one that never does.
The machines at our self-service laundry on Merritt Boulevard take the long awkward pieces that a home drum turns into a rope, and the cool gentle settings are there for a cover with a cord in a casing, which cannot be allowed to shrink at a different rate from the fabric around it.
Our machines and the store are cleaned daily.
Nou wash-dry-fold service covers the everyday laundry.
For general guidance, The American Cleaning Institute publishes a laundry basics guide that is a useful cross-check.
The short version
A tube along the bottom of a door sits in the main air path between a cold space and a warm one, so it traps the dust that air carries and the grit the door drags across it. Identify the filling before anything else. Polyester mats into nodules, foam holds water in its core, and a granular fill cannot be washed at all. Take the cover off if it comes off, vacuum the dry dust first, wash cool, and dry it right through.
WaveMAX Dundalk is at 1774 Merritt Blvd, easy to reach from Dundalk and the surrounding area. If you have a load that will not fit at home, call us at 443-216-7091.