Don’t hurry the laundry process

If there’s one thing that can be learned from stopping spontaneous combustion from occurring in laundries, it’s this: Don’t hurry the process. 

Laundries provide the perfect mix of factors that can lead to spontaneous combustion. Not surprisingly, laundry fires caused by spontaneous combustion have become more common as people try to rush and finish their laundry.

Assume it’s 5 p.m. and a worker isn’t quite done with a load of laundry. She wants to go home, but she knows she can’t leave a dryer running, so she stops the cycle, opens the door and closes it again, and lets the laundry sit. 

Not only will that laundry be wrinkled, but if the worker didn’t wash the laundry correctly and contaminants are still on the material, it’s possible that spontaneous combustion will occur, said Tony Berton, regional field service manager of Alliance Laundry Systems and chief safety officer with the Ripon, Wis. fire department. 

Another example: A health and fitness club attendant was drying towels, and was about halfway through a load. But that employee also wanted to go home early, so he opened and closed the dryer door and left, leaving the laundry inside. A fire later erupted, which was traced back to two towels with massage oil on them spontaneously combusting. 

All too often, people are in a hurry. “Even at home, people will pull clothes out of their dryer before the cool-down cycle is complete,” Berton said. And that’s when problems can occur. 

Many people will pull warm laundry like towels out of a dryer, toss them into a pile or fold them, Berton said. But if they come back and put their hands in the middle of that pile or center of the folded towels, they can still feel the heat. While that isn’t usually a problem, it can become a problem if they used those towels to clean up a spill like vegetable oil, helping to fuel spontaneous combustion if the contaminants did not come out in the wash cycle. 

Berton said people need to let dryers do their job. “Every tumbler has a certain time called a cool-down time, which will bring the temperature down.”