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Can you use The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover on blinds made of fabric? No, I don’t recommend this. What is “The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover” anyway, and how did the topic even come up? Also good questions, my friends.
I started down this rabbit hole one draggy Thursday afternoon here at Blinds Towers, when an email came in asking if you can use “The Pink Stuff” on blinds. That immediately galvanized me into action (by which I mean, gave me a solid excuse to go to the shops during working hours) to pick up a tub of the stuff, so that I could distract several of the shorter attention-spanned R&D folk downstairs on Friday morning finding out.
Anyway, if you want to know about using The Pink Stuff on blinds and whether or not this is wise, please mosey on over to find out the results of our experiments within this accompanying blog post.
Back to the point of this blog post then, “can you use The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover on blinds?” This question came up as an offshoot of our experiments with The Pink Stuff.
The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover is another product from within the “Pink Stuff” range, and is designed for use on fabrics specifically, rather than hard surfaces such as you might use The Pink Stuff itself on.
With this in mind, myself and a couple of the less-essential dudes from Downstairs decided to drag our experiment with The Pink Stuff out until home time, by testing out whether or not The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover could be used to clean blinds/remove stains from fabric blinds safely in turn.
Whilst that was definitely fun at the time, the fact that I’m now writing an essay containing science-y information parsed from product safety data sheets has made this whole game a lot heavier going than I’d intended it to be when I executed a smooth, seamless, and fully justifiable day away from my desk.
I’m aware that I’m starting to sound like one of those food bloggers who require you to read a twenty-page digression on the culture of a little-known area of Italy and its history of olive growing before finally letting you have the recipe for tapenade, so let’s move on.
This blog post will tell you what happens if you use The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover on blinds, and why I suggest not trying this at home.
What is The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover anyway?
If I mocked “The Pink Stuff” as being the most literal product name I’ve ever heard, well, the naming of “The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover,” would seem to indicate that its makers took my retroactive feedback very seriously, and chose to name their sister-product in the most convoluted way possible.
Either that, or they hired a copywriter that’s paid by the word, not that I’d know anything about that…
Anyway, while “The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover” is not the same as The Pink Stuff, the fact that it races out of the same stable and is designed for uh, miraculously removing stains from laundry using an OXI powder-based active agent (just a guess) made me inclined to explore what happens if you use The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover on fabric blinds.
FYI, I have no idea what “OXI” is/means in the context of this product specifically or stain removers in general, and Google’s first result when I tried looking up “what is OXI” did not help, being as it was an article in The Guardian informing me that “Oxi is a highly addictive and hallucinogenic blend of cocaine paste, gasoline, kerosene, and quicklime (calcium oxide) that is wreaking havoc across the Amazon region.”
Just a guess, but I’m assuming that this uh, nasty-sounding gear and the OXI that reputable brands proudly laud as having the stain-removing prowess of a Labrador retriever faced with a dropped lasagne are not, in fact, one and the same thing.
Moving on then from this slightly dark rabbit hole to answer the question I started with…
The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover is designed to remove stains from fabrics, by either adding the product to your machine wash or by soaking the fabrics in water laced with it.
Can you use The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover on blinds in a washing machine?
So now we have a broad idea of what the solution is/does, can you use The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover on blinds to remove stains in a machine wash?
This is a “no” from me for at least 95% of blinds, for either logistical reasons or “will damage your blinds” reasons respectively, or in most cases, both.
Non-waterproof fabric blinds can’t be washed in the machine, for two reasons. The first of these is that washing them in liberal amounts of water will almost certainly damage their fabric (colour running, fading, water marking, other) even without the addition of a fairly harsh stain remover.
The second of these is that most fabric blinds (including roller blinds, day and night blinds, and roman blinds) are permanently attached to their upper tube/header rail, which negates the issue by virtue of the fact that they can’t physically go into the machine anyway!
There is one exception though; vertical blinds. These come in the form of individual louvres, which can be removed and so, that will physically fit into a washing machine.
Vertical blinds come in both waterproof and non-waterproof variants; and the non-waterproof type should be kept out of the washing machine (and general contact with water) just like all other non-waterproof fabric blinds.
Waterproof vertical blind louvres though can potentially be washed at a low temperature in a washing machine with great care, although this would certainly not be my go-to solution for cleaning them.
Also, the product safety data sheet for The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover indicates that the product is notated with the “danger” hazard pictogram shown below, and comes with a caution about the risk of eye damage from contact.
Now for the sake of honesty, I need to make clear that I can claim absolutely zero expertise in chemicals, ingredient applications/interactions, and/or product-safety-data-sheet interpretation.
However, applying a moderate degree of common sense (which TBH my mother might tell you that I also cannot claim any expertise in) leads me to think that the fact that these things are notated for the The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover while they’re absent from say, Bold washing powder (which I also looked up for the purposes of comparison) suggests to me that this is a fairly harsh cleaning product.
For some types/colours/finishes of vertical blind louvres I strongly suspect that it could visibly damage the fabric of the blind; and what it did when used on the plain white untextured louvres that I commandeered for my experiment was to strip off the invisible starch coating that provides vertical louvres with the appropriate degree of stiffness to hang in an orderly and structured fashion.
Can you use The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover on blinds by soaking them to remove stains?
Roller blinds, Roman blinds, and day and night blinds can’t be washed in a washing machine for logistical reasons. But can you use The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover on blinds by soaking the blinds in a solution of it?
Probably not. Whilst in theory, soaking the fabric part of a waterproof roller blind would be safe enough, the fact that the fabric is waterproof would probably negate any benefit of using a product of this type. The MLOPSR (my typing finger is tired now) is designed to lift stains by penetrating the fibres of the fabric and loosening them; this doesn’t happen with waterproof fabrics, as they don’t absorb water.
When it comes to non-waterproof roller blinds and both day and night blinds and Roman blinds (which don’t come in waterproof options at all) you can’t soak them in water without damaging and potentially, pretty much ruining them, and adding a product like The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover into the mix would only worsen the damage.
When it comes to vertical blinds, the non-waterproof type can’t be soaked in a bath of water mixed with The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover for the same reason that the other non-waterproof blinds I mentioned can’t.
Waterproof vertical blinds though can theoretically be soaked in water like waterproof roller blinds can; but this would almost certainly be overkill and/or not really see The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover used to its full potential or in the intended way. In-wash or fabric cleaning solutions can’t penetrate the fibres of waterproof fabrics, and as was the case with the machine-washing experiment, this would possibly remove/dissolve the starching used on the fabric too.
Can you use The Miracle Laundry OXI powder Stain Remover on blinds to safely remove stains or marks?
In summary, I would not advise using The Miracle Laundry OXI Powder Stain Remover on fabric blinds.
Non-waterproof blinds fabrics can’t safely get wet anyway; and when it comes to waterproof blinds, cleaning products won’t penetrate their fabric. You may also find that if used on waterproof vertical blind louvres, the only option for which I didn’t predict a definite failure before commencement of my tests, that it could remove/dissolve the starching from the louvres and causes them to become floppy, limp noodles that don’t look good or hang correctly evermore after.
