A few years ago, I had a stroke of inspiration and put some cheap perfume in my steamer, thinking it would make my clothes smell nice after I de-wrinkled them. It didn’t work. A while later, I noticed crystals building up in the steamer and decided I had ruined the perfume. This week, however, I came across some information that cheered me up: all steamers get crystals in them because of minerals in the water they heat and expel, which means it wasn’t my idiotic behavior that was causing the problem. Yay! Unfortunately, this means we have to clean our steamers regularly. Boo!
Can you use a steam cleaner for every object in your home?
Cleaning a steam cleaner isn’t actually that hard. That’s what I learned when I dug through my closets to find my long-abandoned, crystallized laundry tools. Here’s what I found.
I did some research on the process and discovered that all you have to do is fill the bad boy with some vinegar, or so they say. I dutifully filled my steamer with distilled white vinegar and immediately noticed some crystals floating to the top. Gross! You then have to wait 20-30 minutes for the vinegar to really loosen the gunk inside, so that’s what I did. I left the plug unplugged in my sink and let the vinegar do its thing.
The next step is to plug it in, turn it on, and let the vinegar come out of the spout like water normally would. I assessed the situation and decided I didn’t want the crystals coming through the spout, so I poured the vinegar down the drain and decided to refill it and do a second round of evaporation. To my horror, it was still quite mineralized in there, so I grabbed an old toothbrush and scrubbed. This had very little effect, which made me realize why the second step of expelling the vinegar through the spout is so important: it needs to get hot in there.
