How to Clean Your Child’s LEGO Pieces Because Think About How Awful They Are
If you have kids, you probably have some LEGO bricks (or their equivalent) at home right now. You also likely stepped on (at least) one barefoot and taught your child some of his first curses in the process.
Come to think of it, these little plastic building bricks look disgusting. They were most likely in your mouth, under your bare feet, on the bathroom floor, and were definitely in your child’s little, sloppy hands. If you haven’t washed yours for a while (or ever), here’s how to get them to clean them.
How to clean LEGO bricks according to LEGO version
For some reason, within minutes of leaving the packaging, the LEGO pieces seem to develop this film, which is partly sticky and partly dirty. If you bought these plastic building bricks at a garage sale, yard sale, or thrift store, they almost always come pre-stripped. Either way, you’ll want to wash them.
The official instructions for cleaning up LEGOs are pretty straightforward:
We recommend that you clean your LEGO® pieces by hand using no more than 40 ° C / 104 ° F water and a soft cloth or sponge. Higher temperatures can affect the quality of the parts. You can add a mild detergent to the water – then rinse them well with clean water and you’re done!
They also come with this warning :
Please do not put LEGO® pieces in the washing machine or dishwasher, or try to dry them in the oven, microwave, or hair dryer. When the bricks get very hot, they can change shape, which means they won’t work anymore!
They make it sound so simple.
More detailed tips for cleaning LEGO bricks
We understand why LEGO wouldn’t want to provide potentially mind-boggling, highly detailed instructions on how to wash their bricks, but having a little more information can be really helpful. This is what Joshua Lyon provides in a recent article for Wirecutter .
For starters, Lyon points out that you have to clean each brick individually, which means separating all the bricks that are joined together. While LEGO sells their own brick breakers , which Lyon says make things a lot easier, you can certainly disassemble them by hand. (The brick separator is $ 2.49 though, so if your kids are big LEGO fans this might be a worthwhile investment.)
From here Lyon breaks down the washing process into stages depending on the consumables you need:
- Large plastic basket: Fill it with detergent, water, and a whole bunch of Lego bricks.
- Mild dishwashing detergent: Never use anything containing bleach on your Lego, as this will damage the bricks.
- Soft cloth or sponge: Lego recommends using one of these to clean each brick.
- Small plastic basket or mesh bag: Lego soap bricks can be washed in batches using a small basket, or you can use a mesh bag to wash all the bricks in bulk.
- Towels: Use as many as you need to lay out the Lego bricks while they air dry.
- Fan: Do not expose Lego parts to the high temperatures of a hair dryer. A fan is the best way to speed up the drying process.
And he doesn’t stop there: Lyon also gives instructions on how to clean a large batch of LEGO pieces, restore discolored bricks, and dust off exposed sets.