Can Dryel Save You Time And Money?
If it works, it offers a tremendous bargain. It's supposed to clean up to 16 garments for $10.
The commercials show how you can use the Dryel kit to clean dry-clean-only clothes at home.
"Put your sweater, skirts, even jacket into the reusable bags, drop in the moist Dryel cloth and pop in your household dryer for 30 minutes," it claims.
To see how well Dryel cleans, Consumer Reports deliberately stained cotton shirts, as well as wool pants and silk blouses. They dabbed on everything from gravy to spaghetti sauce to lipstick.
Then they used Dryel's stain remover and followed the rest of the directions.
After the treatment, most of the stains in the wool pants had disappeared. The silk blouse also looked pretty good.
In most cases, all that were left were the numbers marking where the stains had been. But the cotton sweater didn't come clean. You could still see several of the stains.
As for removing odors, Dryel did get rid of heavy smoke and onion smells. But it left behind a strong perfume scent that took a day to go away.
Also, cleaning the clothes proved more time-consuming than it seemed in the commercial.
Procter and Gamble has told Consumer Reports that it is working on a new version of Dryel, due out this month.
