Sea-Water Damage

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 500, 21 January 1949, Page 26

Sea-Water Damage

One of the Links in the Daisy Chain wrote in for suggestions on saving a good kapok mattress which has been soaked with sea-water in their beach cottage which was flooded during a bad storm. As salt is soluble in water, the mattress can be freed from salt by sufficient washing with pure water; but the problem of how best to accomplish this tedious job has been solved by a Link in Mangere, Auckland, who unselfishly sends us this detailed account, Dear Aunt Daisy, I hope this will help the "Link" re the salt water in the mattresses. During the war I bought a mattress stuffed with the utility stuffing. We had only used it for a week or so, when a fortnight’s wet weather set in; and the mattress became so damp that I could wring the moisture out with my hands! Then fine weather came and the mattress seemed to dry out quite well. Soon we had another spell of wet and the mattress again became wringing wet. I de"cided to wash the mattress, as I was quite convinced now that it was stuffed with flock made from materials salvaged from the sea, I put the mattress in the bath, which I filled with warm water. The little children then tramped it, to force the water through all the stuffing. Next we let all the water out and repeated the process till the water ran clean. Finally the children tramped it again, to expel as much water as possible. We left it in the bath for a day

and night, to drain away as much water as we could. I then put the mattress out on a section of trellis, which had been laid across some boxes, until it was light enough for us to lift up on to two clothes lines. It took about three weeks to dry out thoroughly in very 800d drying weather, and it was covered over every evening to keep the dew oft. The mattress is now in constant use, I also did two mattresses which the babies had used for years. I put them on a concrete floor, sprinkled them with disinfectant and soap powder, and then hosed them with a high-pressure hose and scrubbed them with the yard broom both sides of course, quite saturating the mattresses, I dried them in the same way as the flock one, and they came up sweet and fresh as new. These mattresses were of kapok compressed into layers, and so I should imagine that an ordinary kapok could be washed the same way, but I would recommend beating it quite hard and frequently, during drying, to break up the lumps of kapok.

Taffy