Mothballs are usually naphthalene or dichlorobenzene chemical insect repellents that are kept inside your stored garments, furniture, storage trunks and many other places to prevent insects or moths chewing up your garments. Its very effective if you want to get rid of lizards from your house. Mothballs are also used as effective germ killers and insect deterrent in washrooms, toilet drains and sewage pipes too.
What a mothball (buy from Amazon) actually contains are chemical compounds that can undergo sublimation that is converted into a toxic gas that creates an obnoxious air in the closed chambers or pockets of your folded clothing or closed furniture etc. These toxic fumes are very harmful even to humans if inhaled and retains a very hard smell on the articles in which they were used in, especially clothes.
4 Useful Tips to Get Rid of Moth Ball Smell
But there are ways by which you can get rid of mothball smells from your clothes or your furniture:
1 – Never use Water
The very instinctive thought that many people have is to wash the clothing having mothball smell with water. But this is a mistake and should be avoided at all costs. In fact what water does is to make it even harder for you to get rid of the smell.
The chemical nature of mothball constituents is such that the fumes produced need lots of ventilation to escape. So water on the contrary blocks all the air pockets and blocks the ventilations. Sometimes the fumes produced may react with water to form a wet coating on your cloths that will even more strongly retain the smell.
2 – Use Charcoal
There is one more very effective strategy and that is the use of charcoal. Charcoal actually absorbs the mothball odor and makes it more bearable of course. So what you can do is place pieces of charcoal or it is better if you can use grinded charcoal and keep it around your room in different places. Especially concentrate the charcoal in places where mothballs were initially used.
It absorbs the smelly air directly from the source and prevents the smell to spread in the room. Another advantage of using charcoal is that it acts as a disinfectant that takes good care of your home hygiene.
3 – Thoroughly Iron Your clothes
To remove smell effectively from your clothing don’t wash it with water but try to iron it well. Applying heat drives of the smell as it expands the cloth fibers enlarging the air pockets in the stitches and allowing good ventilation. After ironing, leave your shirt in the sun in open air where the smell from your cloth can escape and freely disperse in the air. Certain clothes that cannot take in iron should be treated only with the sun. The sun rays are powerful enough to break the smell of your shirt and the breeze ventilates it away.
4 – Air Fresheners
Other than this take good look around your house if there is still broken debris of mothballs left in any corner. Dispose them off if there are as quickly as possible. You can also use room fresheners or other sprays to cover up the smell.
If you know any other useful tip to dispose off the smell, please share it with us in the comment section below.
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