If you have a household like mine then your washer does a lot of work for you. I do 15-20 loads of wash each week so my washer gets a real workout!  We don’t pay a lot of attention to our washers unless they don’t work or they smell bad.

Well, my problem with my washer was not that it didn’t do its job but that it had a bad smell. I have a top loading commercial Speed Queen washer and I would recommend it to any one, especially if you do lots of wash.

Ok, let’s get back to my problem with my washer. I tried to keep the lid open to see if that would help but that didn’t seem to take care of the problem. So I decided that it must need a good cleaning.

I put the washing cycle on the largest load and set it on hot water. When it was full, I added 4 cups of vinegar and a cup of baking soda. Left it agitate a few minutes then stopped the cycle. I kept the lid closed for almost an hour.

When the hour was almost up, I opened the lid and proceeded to clean all around the edges.  I took my fabric softener dispenser off of the middle post and scrubbed that. Shutting the lid I left the cycle finish. I then washed off all the outside of the washer. Oh, it looked so nice and clean.

After it was done I could hardly wait to see how it would smell. I think it smelled better but it still wasn’t a wonderful smelling washer!

So now what was I to do? I decided to wait a few days and see if it improved. I even watched utube videos to see if I could pull my washer all apart. Oh, it was possible to do but it looked like it would be difficult.

So I decided to try an experiment. My mother always said that if you always use liquid soap your washer will get all gunky (and probably smell?!).  I was not using my home made powdered laundry soap very much at the time. So I decided to see if I used more homemade laundry soap if the washer smell would improve. It didn’t take too many wash days to realize that my washer no longer had a bad smell. And it has stayed smelling good ever since.

So have you ever had a problem with a smelly washer? What did you do to try to fix it? You can always try my Homemade Laundry Soap and see if that helps!