I just bought a new jacket, specifically for taking long walks with my Lab/Great Dane/Bison mix dog, Padraic. The jacket is insulated and waterproof, perfect for the liquid atmosphere of a Pacific Northwest winter.
So, I read the washing instructions on the tag: [ul]
[li]Machine wash cold. Check.[/li][li]Do not bleach. Even I know that one.[/li][li]Tumble dry low in large capacity dryer with tennis balls. uh, what? [/li][/ul]
What am I supposed to do with tennis balls? Stuff the pockets? Fill the sleeves? How many do I need?
Just use a few. The point is to keep the fabric tumbling freely instead of getting stuck to one side of the dryer and going thumpa thumpa thumpa or ending up a sodden mess even after a good long drying session.
Lab/Great Dane/Bison mix, eh? That sounds big. Shame - if it was one of these little fellas, you might not need the tennis balls
Seriously though (animal cruelty not condoned), you just need to toss one or two tennis balls into the drier. I have some clothes that say “Tumble Dry, including a tennis ball”, so one might do the trick.
I have seen similar instructions that say (for a sleeping bag) to tumble dry with an old sneaker in the dryer. Since none of my old sneakers are suitable for tumbling with clean clothes, I safety-pin one inside a pillowslip. It seems to work, but makes one heckuva racket. I suspect tennis balls would be too light and insubstantial to work with something like a sleeping bag.
Oddly enough, it also works well to just dry the jacket with other clothes in a full load.
The point of the balls or shoes is that a single object in a dryer will wrap itself into a knot & then not dry in the middle. As long as you don’t have a single object, you’re fine.
I don’t understand how this works. How do the tennis balls keep the jacket from staying lumped up against the outside? It seems like they would only help if they got “underneath” the coat, otherwise they might randomly beat against it.
I’m not sure where you guys got your explanation of the necessity of tennis balls while drying, but it the ones I’ve heard (since the 70s) have nothing to do with keeping it untwisted (or similar). The only time I’ve heard tennis balls suggested is when drying down or feather filled jackets. The light impact of the balls keeps the feathers from matting together inside the jacket while it tumble dries.
I’ve seen this instruction with our down comforter and both down coats. I thought that maybe the wet clumps of feathers benefitted from being occassionally and random banged into by a relatively hard object. However, at a laundromat recently I saw the attendant giving out socks with tennis balls tied into them, so perhaps they serve a wider purpose for other types of drying needs, too.
I was washing/drying my newish down comforter last week when I remembered that it was recommended to add a tennis ball or two to the dryer to help fluff the down. My husband had just purchased a new can of balls for the dogs so I grabbed a couple and tossed them in. I checked the comforter after about fifteen minutes and was overwhelmed with the smell of hot rubbery tennis balls. Yuck! I will not be doing that again.
I’m almost afraid to ask after the dogs with enemas comment, but…
Will tennis balls help with drying sheets in the dryer? I throw in two or three sheets of bedding into the dryer, and come back virtually every time and find a HUGE knotted ball of sheets…
Not exactly fun to try to take apart, and I end up having to dry them two or three times after unknotting them…
What the heck can I do? (Other than putting dogs or chickens in with the sheets?)
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