As you scourge the Internet to try to figure out an eczema problem, you probably ran across a video with a story of how washing machine gave a toddler chronic skin disease.
While the authenticity of that story is questionable, the content of the video shouldn’t be dismissed without any thoughts. I think it’s important to monitor the cleanliness of the internal plumbing of our washing machine just to make sure it doesn’t contribute to our eczema problems.
In our case, since we moved into our new house and inherited a fairly new front-load washing machine, we did not realize that we needed to run a cycle using washing machine cleaner.
Additionally, we did not notice that there was a barrel and door seal we needed to clean with all the gunks too and the first time we opened it up, the water stunk so bad and the door seal was gross!
So we want to share some tips what worked for us for front-load washing machine:
- Clean the drain pump filter at least once a month. Make sure you drain the water from the drain hose [1] before opening the drain pump filter [2]. Put a pan to catch the water, it’s going to be a lot of water coming out of it.
- At the same time, make sure you clean the drain pump filter. Remove all the gunks that stuck in the barrel.
- Clean the door seal on the front-load door and wipe it dry after every other load (ideally every load, but sometimes it’s not realistic).
- Finally, run the tub clean cycle with washing machine cleaner.
- After completing tub clean cycle, check the barrel to see there’s no dirt or machine cleaner residue left. You can just wipe them with a damp cloth.
It’s a lesson learned for us and we started to do this monthly afterwards. We don’t think our negligence here caused any eczema issues but for sure we don’t want it to be a contributing factor either.