The National Home Laundry Association Facebook ad: “Dog Moms: Affresh Isn't Cleaning Your Washer”

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967401379521112

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Pets

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I doubled my Affresh for 6 months, thinking I was the problem. Twice a month, hot cycle, door cracked overnight, the whole bottle's instructions. My laundry room still smelled like a wet dog had died in there. Then a guy who's been in commercial laundry for 30 years asked me one question that made me realize I'd been wasting $50 a month cleaning around the actual problem. I’m Megan. 3 years ago, I opened a dog daycare outside Tampa with my husband. And for the first 6 months, I genuinely thought I was going to have to shut it down because of the smell. Not the dogs. The laundry. We wash about 100 towels a week here. Plus the cot covers, the blankets people drop off with their dogs, the little fleece things the small dogs sleep on at nap time. The first month, I was running Affresh once a month, like the bottle says - hot cycle, leave the door cracked overnight, the whole thing. And it worked. For about 3 days. Day 4, you'd open the washer, and it smelled like wet dog again. That sour, wet-dog, something-died-in-here smell that gets into the towels and then gets into the cars of the people picking up their dogs. I had a regular, Leslie, with the two French bulldogs, who one Friday, said, "Megan, no offense, but Penny's blanket smells like she rolled in something." That blanket had been washed two hours before pickup. I went home that night, and the second I walked into my own laundry room, I got hit with the exact same smell. My two labs, Tucker and Milan, shed enough hair every week to build a third dog, and my home washer was doing the same thing the daycare washers were doing, just slower. That was the moment it clicked that this wasn't a daycare problem. This was a dogs-and-washing-machines problem, and I had it in both places So I did what every dog mom does. I went down the rabbit hole. I doubled the Affresh, twice a month instead of once. Same result, clean for three or four days, then the smell creeps back. I tried vinegar cycles, a full cup of white vinegar on hot. Tried Borax, the big orange box from the laundry aisle. Tried OxiClean too, both the spray and the powder. Tried that $22 pet detergent at Target with the paw print on the bottle. Tried leaving the washer door cracked overnight every single night. Tried running an empty hot cycle before the first load of the day. None of it worked for more than three or four days at a stretch. By month 6, I was spending close to fifty dollars a month on cleaners, and the smell was still winning. One Friday night, after a full week of running every cleaner I owned and still smelling that wet dog smell on the towels, I sat on the floor of my own laundry room at home and cried. Not a cute cry. The ugly kind, where you're mad at yourself for crying about laundry of all things. Tucker came over and put his head on my knee, and I remember thinking, if I can't fix this at home with two dogs, I'm definitely not fixing it at the daycare with twenty. The next morning, I called the guy who sold us our commercial washers, a man named Rick out of Lakeland who's been in commercial laundry for thirty-something years. I told him the whole thing, the Affresh, the vinegar, the Borax, all of it, and asked him what I was doing wrong. He asked me one question. "Megan, do you have pets in there?" I said, "Rick, I run a dog daycare. I have twenty pets in here every single day." He laughed, not in a mean way, more like the laugh you give when someone tells you they've been trying to fix a flat tire with duct tape. And then he said something that made me feel like an idiot for not figuring it out sooner. He said, "Affresh is oxygen bleach. Borax is oxygen bleach. OxiClean has it right there in the name. Vinegar is just acid. None of those touch protein. And pet hair, pet dander, the oils off their skin, that's all protein. You're cleaning around the problem every month, and the problem is still sitting there." That was the part nobody tells you. Pet hair isn't dirt. It's not soap scum. It's not hard water buildup. It's keratin, the same stuff fingernails are made of, plus the lipid layer from dander, plus skin oil. Oxygen bleach can rinse soap residue off the drum all day long, and it will not break down a single strand of dog hair stuck in your gasket. Rick told me what the commercial laundromats, the vet hospitals, and the groomers actually use. Enzymes. Three of them specifically. Amylase, which dissolves the film that traps the hair against the drum. Protease, which breaks down the actual keratin in the hair, so it flushes out instead of recirculating into the next load. And lipase, which strips off the greasy dander layer that the smell-causing bacteria feed on. He said for the daycare, he'd set me up with the industrial version. But I asked him about home, because I had 2 labs at home doing the same thing to my own washer, and he said there's a company in Florida called Uproot Clean that makes the home version. He told me to get the Ultra formula because of the shedders. I ordered it that night from my couch with Milan asleep on my feet. One tablet, hot cycle, empty drum, went to bed. Opened the washer the next morning expecting some kind of fake lavender smell, or that ocean breeze thing Affresh does, and there was nothing. No wet dog, no perfume, no chemical, just a clean, empty washer that smelled like air. After 6 months of buying tablets every two weeks, "nothing" was the first honest result I'd gotten out of a laundry product. I washed Tucker's bed cover that morning, the big green one he sleeps on by the back door, and pulled it out of the dryer and pressed my face into it like a crazy person. It smelled like the detergent and nothing else. No undertone. No "well it's better than it was." Just clean. It's been about three months at home now, one tablet every two weeks, and the smell has not come back once. Not on day four, not on day ten, not ever. My husband, who normally doesn't notice anything short of the house being on fire, said last week that the laundry room "smells like a normal laundry room again." That was his exact phrase. At the daycare, it's the same story. We've been on the Ultra for 6 months, 100 towels a week, 20 dogs a day - and Leslie, with the French bulldogs, told me last month that Penny's blanket smells better than her own couch at home. She asked me what I switched to, and I told her the same thing I'm telling you now. If your washer smells like wet dog three days after you clean it, you don't need a new washer, and you don't need to buy another box of Affresh. You need something built for protein, not for soap residue. Uproot Clean makes it, the Ultra is the one for shedders, and right now they're running buy two get two free with free shipping and a 60-day money-back guarantee. If it didn't work, I'd have stopped buying it after the first box. If it handles 20 dogs a day at the daycare, it'll handle your two at home. Here’s the link I used to order mine https://uprootclean.com/products/uproot-washing-machine-cleaner-pro

Where the ad sends people

uprootclean.com

Dog Moms: Affresh Isn't Cleaning Your Washer

Uproot Washing Machine Cleaner Pro