I wear suits four days out of the week and my dry cleaning bill is killing me!
$40+ per week!
Is there any other more cost effective cleaning method (other than Dryel, which does not clean a garment)?
Brians, are you digging ditches and sweating up a storm while wearing your suits? You should only dry clean a suit when it’s stained and/or smells bad. Only dryclean your suits every six months or so in my opinion. When you get home from work, take your suit off and hang it up in the closet, making sure there’s plenty of space around it, allowing it to breathe. If you are sending your suits to the drycleaner for pressing, you should get yourself a steamer unit so you can do this at home.
You dry clean a suit every time you wear it? Wow. I can’'t even remember when I last dry-cleaned one of my suits. The pants go in the washer and the jacket can be worn many, many times before it needs dry-cleaning.
While I don’t agree with sailor about putting the pants in the washer (you’ll get uneven wear. It will show. It looks dumb.) it does sound like you may be cleaning your suits too much.
That being said, I’ve found Dryel to be quite good for a lot of my drycleaning.
(It’s a kit you get where you toss the stuff in the dryer.)
Assuming the suit just needs freshining the dryel should work. Be warned however - sometimes the little dryel rag sticks in a funny spot and you’ll get wierd rumpled lines in one part of your suit, so you’ll have to get it professionally done anyway.
You can buy suits that let you wash them in the washing machine.
It’s cheaper for me to just buy a new suit at work, which is a thrift store, than to dry clean it.
Lol, thanks. I’ll remember that.
There are some do-it-yourself laundromats with dry cleaning machines but the hard part is pressing them, not cleaning them. I am not familiar with Dryel but from the description above it sounds bogus.
I agree that you don’t need to clean it every wearing, but waiting until it smells bad is too long!! Cleaning fabric regularly helps extend the life. But, on my cotton suit, the wrinkles need to be pressed long before the suit needs cleaning. I do not recommend ironing or steaming fabric that is not clean. Even if there are no obvious stains, clothes absorb stuff from you (even evaporating perspiration that you don’t even notice) and heat can cause proteins to permanently bond with the fabric.
Some suits actually can be washed in water if you can be bothered to press them. Kind of depends on what you spend on your suits and what quality you need. If you wear a suit just because a dress code says you have to wear a suit, then you just need to look presentable. If you wear a suit because you are a salesman of a high-priced product to CxO executives, then the quality of a wash ‘n’ wear suit probably isn’t what you want.
REad the ingredients before trying water: some fabrics are of mixed blends; two different kinds of fibers that react differently to water. You’ll get all the wool fibers shrinking, for example, and any synthetics not; screws up the fabric. Some fabric really IS dry-clean only, so be careful.