Sheets Keep Balling Up In Your Dryer? Here Are 5 Tricks You Need To Make It Stop

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There's something magic about a clean set of comfortable sheets. Whatever might have gone awry in the rest of your day-to-day life, your sheets are there to welcome you at the end of the day, making you want to curl up for a long night's sleep. Only you can't, because they're in the dryer, balled up into a tangled mass of wrinkly discomfort. They might look like someone has attempted an escape by using them to scale a prison wall, or they've consolidated into a single beach ball-sized mass wound tighter than the Gordian knot, promising several minutes of unpuzzling and then a re-wash to get rid of the wrinkles.

It's common for bed sheets to get balled up in the dryer. It mostly happens because of a lack of space, forcing contact between large items that then gather up everything in sight as they tumble. Being balled up in such a way, of course, prevents proper drying. The problem is largely a matter of airflow and the size and weight of your wet sheets. You should definitely try the obvious potential culprits first: Check that the vent pipe behind your dryer hasn't been crushed, and that you've cleaned your dryer's lint screen. But, there's every chance the problem will take a bit more creativity to solve. Fortunately, we have the tricks you need to end the scourge of balled-up bed sheets.

If twisted sheets from your dryer are making you shout, one simple step that often fixes the problem is just giving the sheets a good shake-out before putting them in the dryer. It also helps enormously to stop the dryer periodically (or, at least, once halfway through) to give them another shake or two. Along the way, you'll free any stray socks and untie any loose knots, and after giving them a good shake you can put the sheets back in the dryer. Pay particular attention to fitted sheets, which tend to accumulate smaller laundry items in their pouch-like elasticized corners.

This aggregation of satellite laundry just makes the balling worse by making the items larger, heavier, and more likely to rub aggressively against other laundry. Shaking your sheets out is basically an act of fluffing them up, as you would a pillow. You're improving airflow because you're increasing the average distance between a sheet and its dryer neighbors–and between different parts of the sheet itself.

You've probably seen these tennis ball-sized orbs of felted wool, maybe because children or cats were playing with them. But, their actual purpose is to reduce static, make laundry dry more evenly, reduce wrinkles, improve softness, and even act as a carrier for essential oils to give your laundry a fresh and natural scent without the problems of dryer sheets. There are alternatives to store-bought wool balls, from DIY felted balls to aluminum foil balls to actual tennis balls. Each has its charms, but we'd stay away from heavier or easily destroyed sports balls. Some balls have particular advantages. None are probably better than aluminum foil for reducing static electricity, for example. Fortunately, no rule says you can only use one type of ball at a time.

Using balls to prevent your sheets from tangling is easy to grasp intuitively. In addition to reducing static (and therefore static cling), the shape and weight of a few balls will cause them to give your sheets a light beating during drying, which does much the same work as a good shake. You're fundamentally adding space, increasing airflow, and breaking up any incipient clumping. Some advocate sticking tennis balls in the corners of fitted sheets, but since that limits their mobility, we'd suggest putting some balls in the sheet corners, while leaving others to roam wild. Throwing in a clean, already-dried towel does some of the same work, with the added benefit of improving drying by absorbing (and then releasing to evaporation) water where it comes into contact with your wet sheets.

This is probably a pretty odd suggestion for keeping your sheets from balling up in the dryer, but it seems to work. The idea is to give your sheets some initial structure while reducing surface area that will cause the sheets to grab onto other laundry or the dryer itself and start tangling. Most often seen as guidance for drying fitted sheets, the fold-first idea is simply to bring the corners together and—if you can—keep them together.

The basic process is this: Fold your fitted sheet in half along its longest side and tuck the newly matched corners into each other, then stick it in the dryer. At a minimum, this eliminates some of the pocket created by the fitted sheet corners, but you might have spotted the potential problem: This fold isn't likely to last long in a spinning dryer. Some suggest attaching the corners to each other with a fold or something like alligator clips or clothespins, and below we'll explore a handful of commercial products that might get the job done. Some say you can also tie a loose knot to keep the corners together, but it's hard to imagine that not causing sheets to wrinkle. For similar reasons, you'll want to button or zip duvet covers, as well as pillowcases that have any kind of closure.

Given the chaos a dryer puts laundry through, it doesn't seem like it would make much difference how you go about loading sheets into it, but it does. There are a couple of helpful dryer-loading rules that minimize sheet balling, and none of them is particularly difficult. First, keep the sheets separated as you add them to the dryer. Just make sure each sheet is in a discrete, loose pile.

Second, don't overload your dryer. Your load should be appropriate to the size of your dryer drum, and probably even a bit smaller. You might even consider drying large items by themselves, particularly fitted sheets. Try to keep the load balanced, rather than allowing multiple sheets to wind up (literally) on one side of the drum. Finally, keep things orderly in the washer as well. Some of the balling action you're trying to avoid starts in the washer rather than the dryer, so try to keep items in your washer separated just as you would in your dryer.

There are a surprising number of products on the market designed to help eliminate the balling of sheets in your dryer. We've already extolled the virtues of the felted wool dryer ball, and while you can certainly make them yourself, they're not particularly expensive. Amazon sells six Smart Sheep wool dryer balls for $19.95. You can also buy spiky plastic dryer balls and, of course, tennis balls.

If clothespins or alligator clips are too pedestrian to hold your fitted sheet corners together, consider Laundry Buddy bed sheet detanglers, also available on Amazon. These plastic clips were designed specifically to keep fitted sheets from swallowing everything else in your laundry. You can also try sock clips. Designed to keep pairs of socks from becoming separated, the clips might also hold onto sheets. Then there's Wad-Free, a Shark Tank product with a rather on-the-nose name that joins your sheets' corners using a mechanism that's reminiscent of an old-school method of attaching guy lines to a tarp-wrapped rock. All of these methods accomplish the same goal, so follow your instincts and the feedback from reviewers to pick the best for your household.