After the long cold winter season, it's time to take out all your storage inflatable bouncers and get ready to bounce into spring. No matter you are an experienced party rental business owner or just an individual bounce house owner, the warm spring season is a good time to clean all your inflatable units like cleaning your own house, to get ready for the active summer. This is particular important for bounce house rental companies. Imagine that how awful is that when your customer set up a jump house for their kid's birthday party and it smells like "urine"! This will tarnish your company reputation seriously. Let's see how to prevent this from happening.

Before you package your inflatable moonwalk jumper into the bag for a long winter season storage, I'm sure you must have been told or realized to clean and dry the inflatable structure before it can be stored. You can find our professional cleaning steps of bounce house by clicking here. But after a couple of months, you don't know what would happen inside. The folded PVC/vinyl fabric and enclosed environment can be breeding grounds for bacteria. That's why you should set it up and give is a good inspection before you can rent it out. If you find any mold and mildew or smell a foul odor, you must spend some time to remove the mold out of your inflatable thoroughly.

Before you start to clean and disinfect your bouncy castles, let's see what useful cleaners and disinfectants you can get from the market. The following are some recommended traditional and all-natural cleaners for you:

  Lysol Disinfectant Spray
  OdoBan Odor Disinfectant
  MonoFoil Antimicrobial Spray (Kills Staph virus)
  THIEVES essential oil cleaner (all-natural cleaner, kills MRSA and Staph virus)
  Red Lion, PA - doTERRA On Guard cleaner (all-natural cleaner)
  Simple Green d Pro 3

Cleaning Outside

For the mold spots on the visible area of your bounce house, it's not difficult to clean. Just clean it like you did after each use. If you want to use bleach and water to clean your inflatable unit besides the above cleaners, mix 1 part bleach to 9 part water and this is the highest bleach concentration ration we recommend. Anything more can be harmful to the materials. Spray the bleach solution on the moldy area and rinse the bleach off several times with a rag and water. If you leave the bleach there, it will fade the colors of the fabric and spend to other spots.

For families with bounce houses, they may want to not use any chemical or use as least chemical as possible. It's a good idea to use a mild dish detergent and wash the unit with a towel or mop. Use white vinegar to clean mildew is also a good way to avoid harsh chemicals. Spray it down with vinegar and leave it in the sun. Vinegar and sunlight will kill the mold and germs.

Cleaning Inside

For some badly stored inflatable units which have mildew on the inside and have a bad moldy smell. It's much harder to get rid of the smell. Fortunately, one of our clients has encountered this similar problem so we can share his experience. If your inflatable has a zipper, you can crawl inside and clean it from there. Wash the dirt off the inside that holds the bacteria that is smelling like you did from the outside. Spray some disinfectant like odoban or spray 9 to kill the mold.

If you don't want to do this dirty work, you can fill the inside with odoban and water to knock out the odor. Take the blower off and empty a gallon of odoban right inside of the tube, then fill the thing with water and roll it up. Unroll it and then roll it in a different direction a couple of times to make sure that the diluted Odoban solution reach the entire inside of the inflatable. Let it sit overnight. Unroll it the next day, inflate it and let it dry and then you will find the stinky smell is gone!

Now you know how to remove the stubborn mold and smell from your bounce house, it's time to get your rental business ready for the upcoming party season!