5 Crucial Laundry Room Safety Tips
This post is sponsored by P&G. Ideas and opinions are my own.
If you are a parent of younger children I am sure you have spent some time childproofing your home. We all make sure that the stairs are blocked. We all keep small items off the floor. We watch for sharp edges and hot surfaces. But how about your laundry room?
I rarely think of my laundry room when it comes to childproofing my home, but the fact of the matter is, there are so many potential dangers we need to watch out for. June is National Safety Month, no better time to make sure everything in your laundry room is where it should be. Here are few crucial safety checks to do regularly in your laundry room:
1. Lint Build Up: Laundry room fires are very common and usually lead back to a lint build up of some kind. Clean out your lint trap before every dryer use, but don’t stop there, at least once a year make sure you pull your dryer away from the wall and vacuum out the back of your dryer, the duct into your laundry room AND the duct leaving your house. It will prevent fires and keep your dryer running better.
2. Repackaged Supplies: Pinterest is great for grabbing cute decor ideas, but when it comes to your detergents and cleaning supplies, keep them in their original packaging. Packaging is designed to help you use the product correctly, it includes instructions and warnings for correct use of the products.
3. Properly Store Detergents and Cleaning Agents: Now that your supplies are in their proper packaging, keep that packaging safely stored. Just like you wouldn’t leave bleach or paint lying around the house, you should never leave any type of detergent accessible to children.
This summer, Tide and Gain will offer the first-ever child-resistant bag design on their liquid laundry detergent packets nationwide. The new bag with a Child-Guard zipper passed stringent child resistance tests outlined in the Poison Prevention Packaging Act and provides the same high standard of protection commonly available on medications and other household cleaners, such as bleach.
After introducing their difficult to open tub in 2013, incidence rates decreased by almost one-third. Since two-thirds of people buy their Tide PODS in bags, P&G knew they had to make this packaging child-resistant as well. In addition to child resistant packaging, P&G’s PODS have a bitter taste added to the outer layer as a deterrent.
P&G cannot address this challenge alone, and believes a collective approach of harder-to-open packaging, advertising, and education from groups like Safe Kids Worldwide and Poison Control Centers are all vital to dramatically reduce accidents from laundry packets. But, the best measure of protection is to treat liquid laundry packets like other household cleaning products and keep them away from children.
Keep them up. Keep them closed. Keep them safe.
4. Keep Machines Locked:聽Many machines have a child safety lock built into them. If your machine does not, you can easily purchase a child safe lock to keep your machines closed tightly. A washer or dryer may seem like the perfect hiding or secret play place for a child and they can easily get stuck or hurt.
5. Maintain Machines:聽Keeping your machines in tip top shape will help prevent leaks, floods, fires, or other accidents. Always make sure your house and ducts are in good shape and made of the best materials to ensure safe and effective usage.
Hi Aimee! Good reminders for all of us. I never heard of washing machine locks. That would be a good idea especially for front loading machines. Sharing this post on Pinterest. Thanks!
This is such a helpful post, thank you so much. I’m in the middle of rearranging and organizing my laundry room 馃檪
You really can’t be too careful.Since I use Tide and Gain, I’m so happy they’re coming out with safer packaging.
The Tide Pods need to be hidden because so many kids are getting poisoned from them. The safety laundry room tips are for everyone to follow and make sure to get the lint out of your dryers because it can cause a fire!
Great tips! I actually have some detergents and such at a level that a child could get into. I need to address that.
Lint build up is a big one in this house: no one cleans the filter and I always worry about fires because of it. Excellent post 馃檪
My laundry room isn’t accessible from the house, which makes things seem secure. I know that it doesn’t mean I can leave things down or in the reach of the kiddos. Thanks for the reminders.
We have a few shelves that are up high that i keep the detergent on. I use a long brush to deep clean the lint trap every Sunday.
I don’t have any little ones running around anymore, but these will also come i handy for keeping pets out of harms way. These are definitely some great tips.
I’m a big fan of P&G products. We just got those pods actually. These are great tips, especially when you have little ones around.
Those are some great safety tips! I think it’s so important to keep things safe around laundry. Those Tide Pods really need to be put somewhere safe. I would never want my kids to be anywhere near those.
When we moved in our house didn’t vent the lint anywhere, it just went to the crawl space. We paid to have a vent put in.
I absolutely love these tips! They’re not only safety related, but organization related too! Thanks for sharing. I always forget that those pods look like candy to kids!
These are amazing tips! It is crazy how fast our kids can get into thins especially when they are younger.
We use Tide Pods too, but keep them far away for the kids. I am interested in trying those Downy beads.
So important to keep the laundry room safe. I have toddler twins so I’ve done all of these things thank goodness!
Oh these are all such great tips and things we tend to forget about. I didnt know that they had locks you can purchase for the washer and dryer! I really need to pick those up.
I never bought these because I was a little afraid of exactly what you mention in here. Defiantly keep it in the original container.
These are all such important tips! There is a lot of danger to be had when it comes to laundry.