The one soft surface nobody washes
Consider a bedroom. Bedding goes in the machine weekly and the duvet cover goes in with it. Curtains are cleaned occasionally, the carpet once a year or so, and pillows are replaced eventually.
The mattress is turned, at most.
It is also the surface with the longest and closest contact with a person in the entire house, seven or eight hours a night, skin against it through a thin sheet, face inches from the surface.
What a mattress holds
Skin. An adult sheds continuously, and a meaningful proportion of that ends up in the bed. It passes through a sheet without difficulty.
Sweat. Everybody loses moisture overnight, more in summer, more with a heavy duvet. Some evaporates and some goes into the mattress, which is where the yellowing on an old mattress comes from.
Dust mites. Microscopic, present in essentially every home, and not harmful in themselves. What causes symptoms is the allergen in their waste, which is light enough to become airborne when the bed is disturbed. They eat skin and they need humidity, which is why a bed is close to an ideal habitat.
Spills and accidents. A spill, a sick child, a pet that sleeps on the bed, a nosebleed. Each goes further in than the mark on the surface suggests.
The symptom pattern worth noticing
Allergy symptoms that are at their worst on waking and ease through the morning point at the bedroom rather than at the season. Pollen does the opposite, worse outdoors, worse during the day, better at night with the windows shut.
If somebody in the house wakes congested, sneezing or with itchy eyes and then improves by mid-morning, the bedroom is worth ruling out. Cleaning a mattress does not cure an allergy. Removing the reservoir where the exposure concentrates is the part you can act on, alongside washing bedding hot and using a barrier cover.
What a clean does
Lifts what is loose. A HEPA-filtered pass over the whole surface, into the piping and along the seams. The seams hold far more than the flat faces, because anything that falls into a crease stays there.
Treats what is stuck. Sweat yellowing, spills and accidents each get their own treatment and time to work. Odor is treated at the source, because masking odor on a mattress lasts a week or two and then fails.
Extracts. Enough moisture to release the soil, taken straight back out. Nothing gets driven deeper, and nothing is left wet.
What a clean does not do
It does not sterilize. No process that is safe to use on a bed you sleep in removes every organism from it.
It does not eliminate dust mites permanently. It removes the food supply and most of the population near the surface. They come back, more slowly, which is why once a year suits most households.
It does not remove every stain. Old, deep, set marks, particularly ones that were scrubbed when fresh, have often changed the fabric rather than sitting on it. We tell you what to expect from a photograph before you book.
It does not replace washing the bedding. The mattress and the bedding are one system, and cleaning one without the other leaves the job half done.
Why the method has to be low-moisture
Carpet dries because air moves through and around it. A mattress cannot: it is a sealed block of foam or springs inside a quilted cover, and there is no way to get air to the middle of it.
Water that gets past the surface layer stays there, and a mattress that is damp inside is a worse problem than the one you set out to solve. The process is therefore deliberately restrained: surface and near-surface soil comes out and the interior is never soaked. Even so, a mattress takes 24 to 72 hours to dry, depending on the season.
Anybody proposing to soak a mattress has not thought about how it would dry.
What to do between cleans
Wash bedding hot and often. Weekly, at the highest temperature the fabric allows. This has the largest effect of anything you can do in the room.
Use a washable barrier cover. A zipped, tightly woven encasement stops skin reaching the mattress and stops allergen coming back out. It is the single most effective thing available and it costs less than a clean.
Let the bed air. Throwing the duvet back for half an hour in the morning before making the bed lets overnight moisture escape rather than trapping it. Making the bed immediately on rising traps that humidity in the mattress.
Keep the room cooler and drier. Mites need humidity, and a bedroom that runs dry is a poorer habitat for them.
Vacuum the mattress when you strip the bed. It does not replace a proper clean, but it removes the loose layer and takes two minutes.
When to book one
Once a year suits most households. More often where there are allergies, pets on the bed, or young children.
It fits alongside a carpet clean in the same visit, because the equipment is already in the bedroom and cleaning the floor while the bed is stripped is the efficient order. If a child's mattress is included, mention it when booking. The products do not change, they are non-toxic and biodegradable in every case, but the order of rooms usually does, so that room is done first and has the longest time to dry.
