How to Clean a Mattress! Sweat, Smell, Stains, Grease and Urine!!

Mattresses are so important to good sleep and being comfortable, but they can be so expensive to replace. If your mattress has unsightly or smelly stains, don’t buy a new one. Clean the one you have! Here are helpful tips and secrets on how to spot clean and generally clean a mattress.

For this demonstration, we borrowed a 10-year-old mattress belonging to a friend of a friend. She is a sweet elderly lady who doesn’t have full control of her bladder. There’s pee, poop, and there might be some blood on it. We’re not entirely sure what all the stains are. So we did a lot of testing to see if we could get it clean.

So, we will show you how to clean a mattress easily with simple ingredients you probably have around the house and without breaking the bank.

Recipe

For our regular all-purpose cleaner solution, here’s what we need:

8 oz of 3% hydrogen peroxide
3 tbsp of baking soda
1-2 drops of liquid dishwashing soap

For special stains, like blood, we used white vinegar or ammonia. And also, to get rid of dirt and grease stains, we used a cloth with liquid dishwashing soap (blue Dawn).

Other Supplies Needed To Clean a Mattress

Heavy-duty spray bottle
Measuring spoon
Fan (optional but will speed up drying time)
Vacuum cleaner such as the cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner
5-10 drops of lavender essential oil

Method

Follow our simple guide to deep clean a mattress and remove those accidental messes with common household ingredients.

Step 1: Spray the baking soda solution on regular/general stains

Spray the entire stained area and let the solution soak into the mark. Ensure it’s not drippy and crazy wet to avoid pulling up stains from the film. And, if you’re thinking of taking the cover off to clean the insides of the mattress, there’s no way to do it. The only best thing to do is to spot-clean it and then put a mattress protector on it to keep it from getting any more stains inside.

The spray bottle might get clogged once in a while so just run some warm water in the sink. Fill up the bottle and then squirt through and clean it out to make it work well again. And also, in case you have a king-sized mattress and a large area to clean, you can pour the solution directly to speed things up.

Step 2: Use vinegar, ammonia, or dishwashing liquid for special stains

Warning: Be careful in dealing with different kinds of bleach or cleaners. Don’t mix bleach with ammonia. It turns into mustard gas. Bleach with vinegar is also a bad combination because it turns into chlorine gas. Both gases are dangerous, so make sure to read your labels first before combining cleaners. We used both ammonia and a little bit of vinegar in the video, but we didn’t mix them. We used them at different times during the day and made sure that the mattress was dry to get it clean.

Janet pouring solution directly into the mattress

For grease, put a little bit of liquid Dawn and some water on a cloth and scrub the spot. Pouring it right on the mattress will make a blue stain.

Step 3: Let the mattress dry overnight or at least ten hours

For example, if you’re in a hurry, you need to clean a mattress today and sleep on it tonight; you can use a fan to let it dry faster. Or you could put it outside, which also helps to bleach out some stains.

Step 4: Vacuum the dried baking soda on the mattress

If you do not have a vacuum cleaner, you can also use a broom to dust off the residue. Even a towel can help do the job.

Verdict and Thoughts

Cleaning the mattress using our DIY techniques turned out better than I thought, so I’m pleased with the results. I hope that our friend is too. Don’t be alarmed if the mattress or even the whole room will stink a bit after you spray the solution into the fabric. Just be patient and let the solution do its magic. The mattress will smell good because the baking soda will help deodorize the mattress, and the hydrogen peroxide will clean and kill the germs.

As I’ve researched, hydrogen peroxide is an antiseptic so it gets rid of the bacteria. So after you’ve mastered how to clean a mattress, you can feel good that not only does it looks clean, but we’ve also killed the bacteria and anything on it that you don’t want to have on the mattress.

So anyway, we’re thrilled that considering that this mattress is 10 years old, it looks great now. It also smells refreshed. Now that it’s beautiful and clean, purchase a waterproof mattress protector so that you don’t have to do this process again. It will help prevent dust and other allergens buildup while also protecting your mattress from stains. You can’t put your mattress in the washing machine, but you can easily wash a mattress protector. Great investment to make!

Our favorite mattress protector

Don’t miss any of our future cleaning tips! We hope that it was informative for you. If you liked this post, share the article with your friends or leave your comments below. And if you want to learn how to clean pee off a mattress this post will help that particular problem.