Hey guys, Anthony from The Rag Company and in today's video we're talking about microfiber care and maintenance to keep your towels soft and safe. Let's jump into it. All right, so before we jump into the microfiber care and techniques and things like that, we're going to briefly discuss what a microfiber towel actually is because this is going to help understand why we use certain products to clean these things. So a microfiber towel doesn't just start off life as a microfiber towel, it starts off as microfiber yarn and microfiber yarn is made of two different materials. You're going to have polyester, which many of you guys know what polyester is and that's going to be the main base and body of the towel and you're also going to have polyamide. Polyamide is going to account for the softness and absorbency of the towel. When you combine these two materials together, it's going to create a very high quality microfiber yarn that's going to have a percentage blend. So typically you're going to have an 80% polyester and a 20% polyamide blend that's pretty standard amongst most microfiber towels, but when you get to the premium range of microfiber towels, you're going to have a 70% polyester and 30% polyamide towel because polyamide is going to be the more expensive material of the two making up of that microfiber yarn. So with that said, microfiber starts off as microfiber yarn and depending on the quality of the yarn is usually going to account for the price that you're paying. So typically the higher price is going to be because it's a 70-30 blend, the lower price is going to be because it's maybe something like a 95-5 blend or a 90-10 blend. So now that we understand that, we can also note that microfiber is not all equal. There's different ways to weave microfiber towels and come up with different microfiber constructions. So for example, we have a waffle weave here, right? Pretty standard weave here, but this is going to be a very absorbent style of towel because it's going to be extremely dense and have plenty of thirst pockets on here that covers basically just very large surface area. Then we also have what's called an ultra plush towel, which is going to be woven completely different and it's going to be extremely soft. You're going to be able to whack your hand on here, you're able to see your hand print on here, which is really cool. And then we also have really cool proprietary hybrid weaves like our Gauntlet drying towel, which has a super cool design on it and is multicolored, which is really cool as well. So microfiber can be made in so many different ways. It's not all the same. So when people ask what's the difference between TRC microfiber and maybe store-bought microfiber, well, I'm telling you right now that most store-bought microfiber isn't going to be making weaves like this. It's not going to be making weaves like this, but it's definitely going to be making more of your standard terry-style weave, which there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that there's a big difference there when it comes to quality. So microfiber yarn is essentially a very, very, very fine plastic style of material, and it's so fine that it feels soft and it does feel like a fabric, but at the end of the day, it's still polyester, right? And so what happens when you introduce heat to polyester? Polyester will shrink, it'll crumble. So if you think of microfiber as being kind of like your hand with all these fingers here, the second they introduce heat, those fingers start shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and eventually crumble up. So when you look at a towel, let's just say an ultra plush towel, those fibers may really start to curl up and ball up and not look correct. And because of that, you're going to lose a lot of that absorbency in the towel and you're going to lose a lot of that softness, meaning that it's not going to pick up water, it's not going to perform its job, and it may actually induce some light marring when it comes to cleaning your vehicle. So heat is going to be the enemy across the board. We'll talk more about that when we get to the drawing step and just remember that and your towels should for the most part last a very long time. So let's talk about washing. You know what's even more crazy than microfiber towels? You not being subscribed to the Rag Company YouTube channel. What are you doing? Subscribe to us, please. It's going to be great for you. It's going to be great for us. It costs you nothing. And plus, where else are you getting all this good microfiber knowledge from? Seriously, subscribe. All right, so jumping into the washing process for microfiber towels, this is an area where a lot more common sense is involved in what most people think, because when it comes to washing towels, you got to think about it kind of like washing any other fabric or maybe even the clothes that you're wearing right now. So I'm not going to take this red shirt right here and wash it with a bunch of my white socks. Why? Because I don't want a bunch of semi-pink socks. It's going to be the same concept with microfiber towels. I do not want to wash my red, beautiful Eagle edgeless towel with my beautiful white Everest 550 towel, because what's going to happen? I'm going to have a pink towel and I don't want that. So keep that in mind washing anything across the board. Always wash with light colors if you can. Wash your dark with your darks, your lights with your lights and things such as that. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is going to be the differences in weaves and whether or not you should cross wash different weaves with other weaves. So a good example of this would be taking our glass towel here. A glass towel is an extremely tight weave. This is a herringbone weave and this is going to hold on to pretty much anything that it gets washed with, including other fibers from other towels. So you want to wash something like this separately, because what's going to happen is if I take this towel and I really rub it up on here, there's a good chance that I have picked up some of those Eagle fibers into my glass towel and those Eagle fibers may come off on my glass the next time I go to clean it, which means now I have this linting towel and a linting glass towel isn't any good. So try to wash with light weaves as well. So I'm going to take my ultra-plushes here, wash these together. Heck, I can even throw on my wash mitt because this is an ultra-plush as well. Throw those together. Maybe I want to wash my applicators on their own so I can take all my applicators, wash those on their own. And let's just say I have an FTW, a twist loop weave, right? Pretty tight weave, not really any type of loose fibers. I'm probably going to wash that with a waffle weave here because that makes the most sense. So again, light colors like weaves and like jobs. So another thing too is that I don't want to wash my wheel towels with my paint polishing towels, just in case that those wheel towels didn't get clean enough in the wash. I do not want to mix those together. So start off by separating your colors, your weaves, and your jobs based on the towel before you even turn on that washing machine. All right, so the washing machine, what setting do you turn this thing on to? Well, you're going to throw in all of your light colors, your light towels, however you're going to do it, throw them in, and you're going to wash on a normal setting or a bulk setting, depending on how many towels you're throwing in. Meaning it's just going to be a normal wash cycle, but the biggest thing is going to be the temperature in which you're washing at. So microfiber towels, I told you again, heat is the enemy. Most hot water systems are set to hopefully 140 degrees or less, ideally. So you can wash on a hot water setting if you want to. We try to tell people not to unless it's like a really, really bad situation, but warm washes, cold washes, all day long. You are never going to hurt those towels in a warm or cold setting. So that's where you're going to start. Now, as far as which detergent to use, that's going to be the important part as well. So Rags to Riches, microfiber detergent. This is made by P&S in collaboration with us. This is meant for microfiber towels. The reason why this is so good is because this is one of the only microfiber detergents, if not the only one, that can actually successfully remove sealants out of microfiber towels, which is massive because basically their surface tension of Rags to Riches is lower than that of the sealants in the towels. It's lower than that of the fibers on the towels, meaning that this is going to be able to dive into those towels and really clean them from the backside out and get all the sealants out of the towels. So Rags to Riches, it's safe. It's extremely economical. It can be used in any type of washing machine, and it has a measure here on the bottle itself, especially in the 32 ounce size. So as far as how much to use, you're going to use one to two ounces, depending on how soiled your towels are. If they're lightly dirty, I'll just use one ounce, and that's like with 20 to 30 different towels in the washing machine. So it's extremely economical. Just one ounce is all I need. But if I have extremely soiled towels, really, really bad wheel towels, I'll typically use two ounces. And so one to two ounces is all you need in the washing machine and you are good to go. Throw them in there. You don't need any vinegar. You don't need any detergent or anything else. This is the detergent. There's a lot of microfiber detergents out there that are typically just boosters for cleaning your microfiber towels. It's not a dedicated detergent. It's simply just an add on. So this is no add on. This is everything you need all in one. What if you don't have Rags to Riches, microfiber detergent? Can you use a different detergent? Yes, you can use a free and clear liquid detergent. As long as it doesn't have any dyes or any type of sensor or anything like that, it's going to be completely safe. You can also use distilled white vinegar if you want to add a little bit of extra cleaning power. But by no means, no means should you ever use a powder detergent. Do not use powder detergents. Do not use Tide Pods because you're going to have leftover material that's going to not dissolve all the way. It's going to get stuck in your towels and possibly ruin the towel, if not ruin the next thing that you're wiping those towels with. So something to keep in mind. Now lastly here, because there's a lot of softies out there. I don't know if I can say that, but fabric softener users. Do not use fabric softeners on microfiber towels. There is no need to do that. Fabric softeners are essentially more kind of fine plastics that are going to get caught in these fine plastics because people think it's going to make the towel softer. Yes, it's going to make the towel softer, but it's also going to clog the h*ck out of these towels and they are not going to be absorbent. So if you've ever wondered why your towels aren't absorbing anything and you've been using fabric softeners, that's why. Fabric softeners will ruin these towels 100 percent. And if you have a washer that's coated in leftover fabric softener residue, then that can get on these towels and ruin those towels as well. So try to stay away from fabric softeners. It's kind of a scam in the first place. I'm not going to get into the whole ordeal, but you don't need to be using them. Trust me. Use just Rags, to Riches, use distilled white vinegar and your clothes and your other textiles, such as your towels are going to be much, much happier. All right. So now that you know the basics of washing, one other thing I want to cover is what if the towels are extremely, extremely soiled and you don't want to throw them in there with your other microfiber towels. Or let's just say you don't want to just throw them into the wash and go through multiple different cycles to try to get out certain stains or things like that. That's when a pre-wash is going to be necessary and something that you can totally do with Rags to Riches here. So what does a pre-wash look like? You're going to take a bucket, you're going to fill this thing up with water and you're going to put one to two ounces into this bucket here. You're going to remove one of your Grit Guards here. Hopefully you have a second one. You're going to toss your towels into the liquid and then you're going to let them hover in here. You can take an additional Grit Guard, go over the top, shove that down and that's going to hold those towels in place there and you're going to let those soak for about a day if not two days. That's going to remove any extra sealants that you haven't been able to get out and it's also going to help remove some stains. And that from there, taking these and throwing them into the wash is going to be a massive improvement over what a standard wash can do alone. Now another trick, you can take a towel. Let's just say there's a gnarly stain right here. We'll just kind of pretend. I can take a sprayer here that has water in it with a little bit of Rags to Riches. This bottle right here has roughly about a quarter ounce of Rags to Riches in it. Not very much at all. I could take that stain, spray it with some Rags to Riches and then throw this in the wash and it's going to have a much more concentrated effect on cleaning that stain or that product out of that towel. Okay, so as far as other washing techniques go, is there other ways to wash towels? Yes. If you want to straight up put towels and a little bit of detergent into a bucket and literally grate them, you could do that if you want to. If you want to throw them in the bathtub, you can do that if you want to. But a washer typically is going to give the best overall clean and that's how we recommend doing it. But the big thing is going to be drying. A lot of people have no idea how to properly dry their microfiber towels and that's where things get kind of sketchy because they don't know. Do I hang and dry them? Do I tumble to dry them? Do I dry them with heat? How does this work? Do they get kind of static-y with heat? What's the process? So drying, this is another situation where again, you want to probably dry with like towels. So again, I want to dry my ultra-plushes together. I don't want to dry my ultra-plush with my glass towel together because again, I'm going to have cross-contamination there and I'm going to get some of these fibers that are going to become loose and end up in this towel which I don't want either. So dry with like things, so start there first, but you're going to want to dry on a low heat setting. Low or no heat. Meaning air tumble dry or low heat. Never go full heat or never go high heat. It will melt those fibers. I promise you there's a lot of dryers out there that have really bad regulators that get exceptionally hot. I have one. My clothes shrink all the time and I can feel my clothes coming out of there and they are on fire. I do not want that happening with my precious microfiber towels. So low or no heat or you can simply hang dry, but we find that when you hang dry towels, you're going to get them feeling a little bit crustier than they should be just because of maybe the water purity that you may have at your home. So another thing you can do is go ahead and hang dry them and then throw them back on the dryer for just a quick tumble dry just to get that softness back. Again, no dryer sheets. Dryer sheets are also fabric softeners. You do not want anything in there. So before you throw your microfiber towels into the dryer, do a quick inspection. Look around, make sure there's no loose dryer sheets and then throw the towels in there and then clean out your lint trap as well, because you don't want any leftover lint or dog hair ending up in your towels as well. After that, that's when it comes to the towel folding and storage. All right. So the big question here is towel folding and storage. How should you fold your towels? You should fold them however the heck you want to fold them or don't fold them at all. Just go like this, throw them into a pile, and then from there, throw them into your storage solution. So speaking of storage solution, how should you store your microfiber towels? I tell people to not store them in the open air, right? Do not store them on an open shelf, especially in your garage, because what happens in garages, garages get dusty and you do not want all that dust landing into your towel. So however you want to do it, just store them in something enclosed. You do not leave them open into the air because these fibers right here do a very good job of catching dust. And if it's in a dusty garage, it's going to catch all that dust. And the next time you go to use it, you're going to wonder, why is there this lint and stuff coming off my towel? It's because you're storing them in a dusty garage. So don't do that. And you should be on the right track. Levi will store his sometimes in trash bags. Seriously, he'll take a clean trash bag and he'll throw them in there. And that's actually an okay option because you know, it's fully enclosed. I myself like to store them in plastic totes. That's the easiest way for me to do them. I simply organize them by their job. So hopefully you have learned something new in today's video. And hopefully you guys are ready to care for your microfiber towels the way that they need to be cared for. Now, if you follow the techniques in this video and you follow some of the things I've said, there is no reason why these towels shouldn't be lasting you years and years, if not hundreds and hundreds of washes in one way, shape or form. Seriously, microfiber towels are extremely durable and they're meant to last a very long time. And you should be getting a lot of life out of them, especially if you're using a dedicated microfiber detergent. So again, hopefully you guys learned something new. Hopefully you enjoyed this. And as always, if you guys enjoy and love the microfiber content, please make sure to give us a big thumbs up, subscribe down below for more and stay tuned for more videos right here at The Rag Company.
