How often should you wash your comforter?

Short answer: two to three times a year if you use a duvet cover and wash your sheets weekly, and every two months if you don't. Anything more often wears the fill down; anything less and you are sleeping under a season's worth of skin cells, sweat and dust.

The longer answer is that most people avoid washing their comforter for a practical reason — the last time they tried, it came out lumpy.

Why home machines wreck comforters

A king comforter needs room to tumble. In a standard home washer it becomes a wet rope: the middle never gets clean, the fill packs into one corner, and the spin cycle is unbalanced enough to walk the machine across the laundry room.

Drying is worse. Home dryers cannot move enough air through a thick duvet, so the outside dries while the inside stays damp — which is how comforters end up smelling musty two days after a wash.

What to do instead

Use a machine that fits the item. Our 6-load and 9-load washers give a king duvet space to actually move, and the large dryers push enough air to dry the core, not just the shell.

For down, dry low and slow, and break the fill up by hand a couple of times as it dries. That is what makes the difference between a comforter that lofts and one that stays flat.

Between washes

Use a duvet cover and wash it weekly with your sheets. Air the comforter for an hour on a dry day. Spot-clean spills straight away rather than letting them set.

If you would rather not think about it, add the comforter to a pickup and it comes back clean, dry and lofted in 48 hours.