Cleaning Pillows

Customer Question: How Do You Clean Pillows?
A: The filling in bed pillows can be down, foam rubber, foam chips, polyester fiberfill, and kapok. The safest method to clean a pillow is based on the type of filling. If the filling in the pillow is fiberfill it is usually best to launder or remove the filling and replace the ticking. Foam chips can harden with time and begin to crumble. It is probably best not to clean these types of pillows.

Down-filled pillows can be cleaned using a pillow machine. The down is removed from the ticking and placed directly into the pillow machine. The down is sometimes deodorized with ozone or sanitized with ultraviolet light. The features are then blown from the pillow machine into a new ticking and additional feathers may be added to fill out the pillow, if necessary.

Washing down pillows can present several problems. The fabric ticking may be too fragile to handle the agitation of washing and tumble drying or so soiled it would be best to replace it. Often the ticking is sized with water-sizings. These sizings help hold the down in the ticking. If the sizing is removed in washing, feathers may leak out.