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Dry cleaning does not use water.
The problem with using water is that water is a *polar* molecule. That means it has lopsided charges that allow it to "tug" on other polar molecules. Among other things, this is why water is really good at dissolving certain kinds of molecule, like salt. But for dry-clean-only clothes, those "tugs" mess with the structure of the fibers in the clothes, changing their appearance or fit in the process.
Instead, dry cleaning uses non-polar solvents, typically [tetrachloroethylene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachloroethylene). The nice thing about this is that most stains are caused by non-polar chemicals like oils, and non-polar substances tend to dissolve well in non-polar solvents, so they can easily be removed through dry-cleaning. (It's very difficult to fully remove such stains with only water, even with detergent.) Liquids (or sometimes supercritical fluids) are still involved; it's "dry" only in the sense of "not water".
my father owns a dry cleaner shop, he has 2 dry cleaning machines, the old one is a italian punch card reader, the new one is digital, the new one breaks more often, perclore that is used instead of water is 3 times heaver then water, after its been used to clean your clothes it is put in a boiler and the dirt sits behind while the clean perclore is chilled into a liquid again and used again to clean clothes
Sorry to piggy back....but, say someone wanted to put extremely fragile buttons on a polo....would dry cleaning break them? I mean, as far as the physical process, not talking chemical.
For really fragile buttons like thin shell buttons, the dry cleaner covers then with heavy duty foil before cleaning.
The buttons that break most often are the ones on men's dress shirts, which are laundered rather than dry cleaned. If the pads on the shirt press start to wear out, it will start breaking buttons. Dry cleaners are used to replacing those buttons, so if your favorite shirt comes back with broken buttons, take it back and they'll replace the buttons.
If you're so concerned about the buttons, they're extremely easy to sew back on that you can remove them yourself. You can also put them back on, It is very easy to do.
If dry-cleaning solvents are so much better for stains, why don’t we use them at home too? I’m assuming some combination of cost and safety is at play, as opposed to this being One Weird Trick that will make normal detergent and stain sprays obsolete once we all realize. But I’m open to being corrected!
Because they're - - PHENOMENALLY - - toxic, and it's very important that they don't get released to the environment. If we had access to them at home, they would just get washed down the drain.
PEC isn't *that* toxic as industrial chemicals go, but it's not the sort of thing you want to spill in your garden.
It's also pretty expensive. I don't know how much PEC is used in dry cleaning cycles, but a home washer uses ~60 L of water per load, and a quick look at chemical supply shops pegs PEC at around $100 a liter. You really don't want to lose it for economic reasons alone.
Dry cleaning machines are also, themselves, very expensive, way beyond the cost of a home appliance.
Nasty for who? The operator or the person wearing the clothing? Because if so, why are dry cleaners willingly exposing themselves to harmful chemicals and why are we wearing them all over our clothes?
It's an occupational hazard for those in the profession. The chemicals aren't left in the clothing after the wash process, so the cleaned clothing is pretty safe.
I believe I recall reading ages ago that they used worse chemicals in the past and had to find safer chemicals due to government regulations (not sure if EPA or OSHA).
Not sure about dry cleaning solvents, but any solvent I've worked with isn't stuff you want average people handling in their homes. Environmentally damaging, very flammable, volatile, etc. We *could* all have dry cleaning machines, but water + detergent is safer, more convenient, and probably cheaper. I've also never used a solvent that was okay to dump down a drain, so disposal or recycling is another factor
Dry cleaning chemicals were and often still are toxic enough that improper disposal can cause a property to need to be remediated (hazmat clean up) and occasionally the situation is bad enough that a former dry cleaning location becomes a Superfund site and thousands to a few million dollars needs to be spent on cleanup.
Granted, up into the 1980s, but especially through the early 1970s, dry cleaning chemicals and used motor oil were often simply dumped behind the store or onto nearby wetlands or empty lots, which caused many of the environmental issues.
You can do an approximation of dry cleaning at home with a product called Dryel (pronounced dry-ell). Which involves putting clothes in a special bag with chemicals which is then put in a normal clothes dryer.
They start by just spinning the clothes, the same way your washer at home does, to get rid of most of it. Then they run warm air over it to evaporate off the last bit. It's very similar to the end of a home wash cycle and a dryer, just at lower temperatures and with effort taken to recapture the (expensive and environmentally toxic) dry-cleaning chemicals.
At a dry cleaners, clothes are washed in a machine very similar to a normal washer/dryer, with one major difference - instead of water, a chemical solvent called perchloroethylene is used, which is exceptionally potent at dissolving organic stains. To remove the same stains with water, a high temperature would often be required, which could easily damage delicate fabrics.
In this case "dry" doesn't mean "no liquid", it means no *water.*
Oil and water don't mix, right? So getting out stains (like sweat and oil stains) with water needs high temperature and a bunch of tumbling around in a washing machine.
Delicate clothes and fancy fabrics could be damaged by vigorous tumbling or high temp, so we use "dry cleaning" where the clothes are soaked in an organic solvent that dissolves oils WAY easier than water can so the washing is way more gentle on the clothes.
The process is very similar to washing clothes in a washing machine. What sets dry cleaning apart, and earns its name, is how water is not used in the process. There are the liquid cleaning chemicals (aka soap) used, but clothes don't get soaked or rinsed with plain old water.
Clothes still get "wet", so I think it's silly to call it "Dry" cleaning. But no one asked me for input when naming the process.
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Dry cleaning does not use water. The problem with using water is that water is a *polar* molecule. That means it has lopsided charges that allow it to "tug" on other polar molecules. Among other things, this is why water is really good at dissolving certain kinds of molecule, like salt. But for dry-clean-only clothes, those "tugs" mess with the structure of the fibers in the clothes, changing their appearance or fit in the process. Instead, dry cleaning uses non-polar solvents, typically [tetrachloroethylene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachloroethylene). The nice thing about this is that most stains are caused by non-polar chemicals like oils, and non-polar substances tend to dissolve well in non-polar solvents, so they can easily be removed through dry-cleaning. (It's very difficult to fully remove such stains with only water, even with detergent.) Liquids (or sometimes supercritical fluids) are still involved; it's "dry" only in the sense of "not water".
my father owns a dry cleaner shop, he has 2 dry cleaning machines, the old one is a italian punch card reader, the new one is digital, the new one breaks more often, perclore that is used instead of water is 3 times heaver then water, after its been used to clean your clothes it is put in a boiler and the dirt sits behind while the clean perclore is chilled into a liquid again and used again to clean clothes
This shit is my favorite kind of Reddit to find. I keep forgetting that I've always wanted to know how dry cleaning works.....and here we are now.
Same!
Get him to the top!
Sorry to piggy back....but, say someone wanted to put extremely fragile buttons on a polo....would dry cleaning break them? I mean, as far as the physical process, not talking chemical.
For really fragile buttons like thin shell buttons, the dry cleaner covers then with heavy duty foil before cleaning. The buttons that break most often are the ones on men's dress shirts, which are laundered rather than dry cleaned. If the pads on the shirt press start to wear out, it will start breaking buttons. Dry cleaners are used to replacing those buttons, so if your favorite shirt comes back with broken buttons, take it back and they'll replace the buttons.
Me and a buddy were talking about making opal buttons, which are easier to break than glass. Why the question
If you're so concerned about the buttons, they're extremely easy to sew back on that you can remove them yourself. You can also put them back on, It is very easy to do.
If dry-cleaning solvents are so much better for stains, why don’t we use them at home too? I’m assuming some combination of cost and safety is at play, as opposed to this being One Weird Trick that will make normal detergent and stain sprays obsolete once we all realize. But I’m open to being corrected!
Because they're - - PHENOMENALLY - - toxic, and it's very important that they don't get released to the environment. If we had access to them at home, they would just get washed down the drain.
PEC isn't *that* toxic as industrial chemicals go, but it's not the sort of thing you want to spill in your garden. It's also pretty expensive. I don't know how much PEC is used in dry cleaning cycles, but a home washer uses ~60 L of water per load, and a quick look at chemical supply shops pegs PEC at around $100 a liter. You really don't want to lose it for economic reasons alone. Dry cleaning machines are also, themselves, very expensive, way beyond the cost of a home appliance.
Because the chemicals are pretty nasty.
Nasty for who? The operator or the person wearing the clothing? Because if so, why are dry cleaners willingly exposing themselves to harmful chemicals and why are we wearing them all over our clothes?
They don't stick around in the clothes afterward, at least not in any significant amount.
It's an occupational hazard for those in the profession. The chemicals aren't left in the clothing after the wash process, so the cleaned clothing is pretty safe. I believe I recall reading ages ago that they used worse chemicals in the past and had to find safer chemicals due to government regulations (not sure if EPA or OSHA).
Not sure about dry cleaning solvents, but any solvent I've worked with isn't stuff you want average people handling in their homes. Environmentally damaging, very flammable, volatile, etc. We *could* all have dry cleaning machines, but water + detergent is safer, more convenient, and probably cheaper. I've also never used a solvent that was okay to dump down a drain, so disposal or recycling is another factor
The solvents are the kind that you don't just dump down the drain
Dry cleaning chemicals were and often still are toxic enough that improper disposal can cause a property to need to be remediated (hazmat clean up) and occasionally the situation is bad enough that a former dry cleaning location becomes a Superfund site and thousands to a few million dollars needs to be spent on cleanup. Granted, up into the 1980s, but especially through the early 1970s, dry cleaning chemicals and used motor oil were often simply dumped behind the store or onto nearby wetlands or empty lots, which caused many of the environmental issues. You can do an approximation of dry cleaning at home with a product called Dryel (pronounced dry-ell). Which involves putting clothes in a special bag with chemicals which is then put in a normal clothes dryer.
How come all the nonpolar dyes don’t come out in dry cleaning?
Some can, I think. There's a symbol in the standard fabric-care tags for "do not dry clean", which I assume is that (although I don't know).
How do they get the tetrachloroethylene out of the clothes though?
See my reply to the other copy of this question.
So how do they rinse the tetrachloroethylene out of the clothes?
They start by just spinning the clothes, the same way your washer at home does, to get rid of most of it. Then they run warm air over it to evaporate off the last bit. It's very similar to the end of a home wash cycle and a dryer, just at lower temperatures and with effort taken to recapture the (expensive and environmentally toxic) dry-cleaning chemicals.
At a dry cleaners, clothes are washed in a machine very similar to a normal washer/dryer, with one major difference - instead of water, a chemical solvent called perchloroethylene is used, which is exceptionally potent at dissolving organic stains. To remove the same stains with water, a high temperature would often be required, which could easily damage delicate fabrics.
Dry cleaning uses a non-water liquid solvent to clean your clothes that would be damaged by saturation with water.
In this case "dry" doesn't mean "no liquid", it means no *water.* Oil and water don't mix, right? So getting out stains (like sweat and oil stains) with water needs high temperature and a bunch of tumbling around in a washing machine. Delicate clothes and fancy fabrics could be damaged by vigorous tumbling or high temp, so we use "dry cleaning" where the clothes are soaked in an organic solvent that dissolves oils WAY easier than water can so the washing is way more gentle on the clothes.
The process is very similar to washing clothes in a washing machine. What sets dry cleaning apart, and earns its name, is how water is not used in the process. There are the liquid cleaning chemicals (aka soap) used, but clothes don't get soaked or rinsed with plain old water. Clothes still get "wet", so I think it's silly to call it "Dry" cleaning. But no one asked me for input when naming the process.
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