Lately I‘ve received numerous emails from people asking me for advices how to clean their memory foam mattresses. The primary problems were that they have little children or puppies that leak all over the place including on the bed. (my puppy did it twice and I barely cleaned covered up that accident), so I‘ve decided to write a nice guide on how to clean the mattress at home.

First lets say a few words on how your mattress is constructed. Usually the covers are our of a stretchable, thinner velour or terry cotton material and below it is a thinner socking material that is used to make the mattress fire resistant. The body of the mattress is made out of few layers of different density memory foam material, starting from the top with very low density very heat sensitive material, inner layer of medium density/strength foam and lower layer of high pressure/density memory foam. The sizes of each layer depend on the solely on the manufacturer and the type of sleep number bed. Most mattresses have about 2-3 layers, but some can have up to 8.

The dense nature of the memory foam is really tricky to clean as it soaks huge amount of liquid and then has to dry for days in order to be usable again. In order to clean the mattress you need to be able to pass sufficient cleaning product through the mattress to release the urine and cleanse the foam fabric, flushing the contamination out the other side and neutralizing the offending smell and bacteria....

From experience I can confirm that the best way to clean a memory foam mattress is to use Hydrogen Peroxide (H202) and sodium bicarbonate as cleaning agents. Be advised that the Hydrogen Peroxide acts as bleach and can cause some serious discoloration and be careful where you‘re spreading the liquid. Also you should use gloves while applying the liquid. The challenge in a normal home environment, where the mattress is in one piece, is to be able to get sufficient hydrogen peroxide into the body of the mattress to reach the full extent of the urine stain and also to pass out the other side carrying the waste products of the contamination. In addition, you have the difficult task of drying the mattress internally, which is extremely hard thing to do as it soaks so much water and it takes about a week or so to dry completely. After sponging the cleaned area with towels and cloths, you will need to allow at least 3 - 5 days drying in a good warm air flow. Using a hair dryer over the top surface may help, as it helps to assist in the wicking effect of moisture travelling up from the internal damp area to the dryer top surface of the mattress where it evaporates to atmosphere. If you do use hair dryer please make sure you don‘t get it too hot because it might damage the foam.

This cleaning should be able to solve your issue. It might still keep some smell but it will be quite better than what it was before. In my experiment with my mattress it was completely cleaned from the smell and the dog didn‘t do it any more which is good.

As a good suggestion, if you know that you might get some accident on the memory foam mattress you can protect it by fitting a water resistant cover whenever there is a threat of incontinence or pets ‘marking their territory‘ by peeing on the mattress.

If you have any further questions please send me email and I‘ll try to answer in timely manner.

UPDATE:I received that response from one of our readers:

I thank you SO much!!! Being this is only a 4" topper I think the solution your provided with work wonderfully!

Again, I can‘t thank you enough for your time and effort in finding this answer for me.

A bleached mattress? Ah well, it‘s covered by a sheet anyway =o)

Have a wonderful day!

Lisa

ps - natural for anything is best........i‘m always on the look out for nonharmful ways/products.