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I almost spent $1,400 to fix a musty smell. The repairman who showed up the day before delivery told me to cancel the order. He said my washer was not broken. He said almost every pet owner he visits has the same problem, and that almost nothing sold in stores is built to fix it. He was right. A $20 tablet did what two years of vinegar, Affresh, bleach, and three different detergents could not. I have two dogs, a golden named Rio and a smaller mutt named June, and I do a lot of laundry. Dog blankets, the cover off the couch, the throw from the chair Rio is not supposed to sleep on but sleeps on anyway. Hoodies that smell like dog because the dogs sit on me while I am wearing them. For the first few years in our house, the laundry came out smelling like laundry. And then, somewhere around the second summer, it stopped. It was not anything dramatic at first, which is part of why I let it go on so long. It was just a faint mustiness on the towels, the kind of thing you notice when you pull one off the rack after a shower and hold it up to your face for a second longer than usual. Then it was the sheets. Then it was my husband's running shirts, which started smelling sour again about an hour after he put them on. Then it was the dog blanket, and at that point, I could not pretend anymore. I did what everyone does. I left the washer door open between loads. I wiped down the gasket with a paper towel and was a little horrified at what came off on it. I ran an empty hot cycle with two cups of white vinegar, because that is the first thing the internet tells you to do, and for about three days, the laundry smelled a little better. Then it came back. I tried Affresh next. I dropped a tablet in, ran the cleaning cycle, and felt like I was finally being a responsible adult about my appliance. It helped for about a week, and then the smell crept back in around the edges. Towels first, then the dog blanket, then everything. So I tried baking soda. I tried bleach on the gasket, scrubbing it with an old toothbrush, which made me gag a little because of what was living back there. I switched detergents twice, once to a "free and clear" version because someone in a Facebook group swore that fragrance was the problem, and once to a pricier plant-based one because I had convinced myself I was just buying the wrong thing. Some of it worked for a little while. None of it worked for long. By the end of the second year, I had a routine that involved sniffing every load before I folded it, rewashing about a third of what I pulled out of the machine, and apologizing to my mother-in-law when she came to visit and asked, very carefully, whether one of the dogs had gotten into the linen closet. That was the week I started pricing new washers. I told my husband I was done, that I had given the machine every chance, and that I would rather spend $1400 than keep washing the dog blanket three times in a row to make it tolerable. He agreed. We picked out a new one, the kind with the bigger drum and the steam cycle, and I had the tab open on my laptop for two days. Before I clicked buy, I scheduled one more service call. Not because I thought it would fix anything, but because I wanted to be able to tell myself I had tried everything before I dropped that kind of money. The repairman who came out was probably in his early sixties, the kind of guy who has been inside more washing machines than most of us have been inside grocery stores. He asked me what was going on, and I gave him the whole speech, the vinegar and the Affresh and the bleach and the detergents, the dog blanket, the apologetic mother-in-law. He let me finish. Then he asked me a question I was not expecting. He asked me if I knew that there was a sealed space inside my machine that I could not see and could not reach with my hands, but that water flowed through every single cycle. I said I did not. He said almost nobody does. He told me that in a house with two dogs, that sealed space is where everything ends up. Skin oils from the coats. The waxy stuff that dog hair carries that does not dissolve in water. Microscopic bits of dander and broken fiber that are too small to catch in any filter. He said it settles on the wet surfaces in there, load after load, and builds up into a layer that gets thicker every month. He said the water from every cycle flows back through that space and picks up whatever is growing on those surfaces, and then carries it right back onto the laundry. That was the smell. Then he said the part I have thought about most since. He said, "Ma'am, your washer is fine. The problem is that none of the stuff you have been pouring into it was ever built to break down what is actually in there." He told me the water from my vinegar cycles was reaching the buildup. He told me the Affresh was reaching it. He told me the bleach water was reaching it. None of them were sitting on the outside of the problem. They were all flowing right past it. The issue was the chemistry. Vinegar is a mild acid. It was built for hard water and soap scum. Baking soda is a mild alkaline. It was built for odor absorption in dry environments. Affresh and the store-brand tablets are formulated for mineral deposits. None of them, he said, are built to break down a biological layer made of skin oils and dander and waxy residue from a dog's coat. They reach it. They just wash over it and leave it intact. He said the chemistry was wrong. Not the machine, the chemistry. Then he told me about a tablet his daughter had started using. He said she had three dogs and the same problem I had, and she had been ready to replace her machine too. He said her father-in-law, who used to work on commercial laundry equipment for a living, had told her to try this one specific tablet before she did anything else. He said it was the only thing he had seen actually break down the layer that builds up in a machine like mine, because it was formulated specifically for that biological residue instead of for soap scum or minerals. He wrote the name down on the back of a work order. It was Uproot Washing Machine Cleaner. I want to be clear about something here, because I have been on the other side of this kind of story, and I know how it sounds. He was not selling it to me. He did not get a commission. He told me, almost as an aside while he was packing up his tools, that if I wanted to spend fourteen hundred dollars on a new washer, he would happily come install it, but that I would probably have the same smell back in eighteen months if I did not deal with the buildup first. I ordered the tablets that afternoon. They got to the house in a couple of days. I read the instructions twice because I am that kind of person, and then I dropped one in the empty drum and ran the cleaning cycle on hot, the way it said to. I am not going to tell you that something dramatic happened in the first minute. The machine just ran, the way it always does. About thirty minutes in, I walked past the laundry room and noticed the water draining out of the machine was dark. Not a little tinted, dark. Like coffee. I stood there and watched it for a while, because I had been running cleaning cycles on this machine for two years, and I had never seen the water come out looking like that. That was the buildup the repairman had been talking about. That was what vinegar and Affresh had been flowing right past for two years. I ran a second tablet through, because the instructions said to for a machine that had been neglected, and the water that came out the second time was lighter but still not clean. By the third cycle, it was running clear. Then I washed the dog blanket. I want to be careful here because I know how this part of a story usually sounds. I am not going to tell you it came out smelling like a meadow, or that I cried, or that my husband walked in and said his life had changed. None of that happened. What happened was that I pulled the dog blanket out of the machine, held it up to my face the way I had been doing for two years, and it smelled like clean cotton. Not perfumed. Not masked. Just like fabric that had been actually washed. I stood there in the laundry room for a minute longer than I needed to. That was about four months ago. I have been using a tablet once a month since, the way the instructions recommend for a household with pets. The smell has not come back. The towels do not turn sour. My husband's running shirts smell like detergent for the whole run, not for the first ten minutes. The dog blanket smells like the dogs for about two days after I wash it, which is exactly how it is supposed to work. I never bought the new washer. The tab is still open on my laptop, actually. I keep meaning to close it. I am not a repair person. I am not in appliances. I am one woman with two dogs and a front-load washer that I almost replaced for fourteen hundred dollars because nobody had told me, in two full years of trying, that the problem was not what I was reaching with my cleaners. It was what my cleaners were reaching and not built to break down. If any of this sounds like the laundry room you have been standing in, here is the only thing I would say. Try the tablet before you buy the washer. https://uprootclean.com/products/uproot-washing-machine-cleaner-pro ~ Carrie B. P.S. - A few things I would add, for anyone who wants them. Uproot has a 60-day money-back guarantee, which is what made me willing to try it in the first place. If it does not work for your machine, you send it back, and that is a reasonable policy for something in this price range. I would give it at least three cycles before you decide anything, because if your machine is anything like mine was, the first cycle is mostly going to be breaking down the worst of what has been building up, and the real test is what the laundry smells like after. P.P.S. - Two friends from my neighborhood have asked me about it since I started. One of them has a lab who swims in the lake all summer, and her laundry room had gotten to the point where she was washing his towels in a separate machine in the garage. She tried the tablet about six weeks ago and texted me last week to say she had moved the towels back inside. I am not collecting names or running anything on the side. I am telling you that two women who had never asked me about a cleaning product before asked me about this one, because something had changed in the way our houses smelled when they came over. P.P.P.S. - One more thing, because I have been thinking about it. For two years I apologized for how my house smelled. I apologized when my mother-in-law came over. I apologized when I handed my husband a clean shirt and watched him sniff it before he put it on. I apologized to myself, every time I pulled the dog blanket out of the machine and put it back in for another cycle. The thing that bothered me the most, looking back, was not the smell. It was that I had started to think of my house as the kind of house that smelled like dogs, and that I had started to think of myself as the kind of person who could not keep up with her own laundry. Neither of those things was true. The chemistry was wrong. That was all. The tablet costs about twenty dollars. The cycle takes about an hour. I run one on the first Saturday of every month while I am making coffee, and the rest of the laundry just works the way it is supposed to. That is the actual reason I keep using it. The rest is just the dog blanket. https://uprootclean.com/products/uproot-washing-machine-cleaner-pro Individual experiences vary. Results depend on machine condition, usage, and household.