The Liner Does All The Work And Gets None Of The Attention

Two things doing two jobs

The fabric curtain hangs outside and is mostly decorative. It gets splashed and it goes in the wash with the towels a few times a year, and that is the whole of its maintenance.

The liner hangs inside, takes the water, and holds it along the hem where the weights are. That bottom edge is wet for hours after every shower and often folded against itself, which is as close to ideal conditions for mildew as an apartment offers. Almost every complaint about a shower curtain is actually about the liner.

Wash the liner in the machine

• Take it down with the rings still on if they unclip at the top, or unhook it and leave the rings on the rod.
• Put it in with two or three old towels, which provide the friction that gets the film off.
• Warm water, gentle cycle, normal detergent, and half a cup of baking soda if it has gone grey.
• Add white vinegar to the rinse rather than to the wash, since vinegar and detergent cancel each other out.
• Never put it in the dryer. Plastic liners melt or shrink, and fabric ones crease permanently.
• Hang it straight back on the rod dripping wet and pull it closed. It dries flat with no creases and no ironing.

Every month or two is right for most bathrooms, and more often in a bathroom with no window or with several people using it.

The habit that matters more than the washing

Pull the liner closed across the tub after every shower. Bunched at one end it holds folds of standing water for hours, and every fold is a place that stays wet. Spread out, it dries within an hour or two.

The second habit is shaking the bottom hem out and separating it from the tub wall. A liner stuck to wet tile does not dry at all, and the black spotting always starts exactly there. Neither habit takes more than a few seconds and together they roughly double how long a liner lasts.

The rod and the rings

The top of the rod collects dust that nobody sees from below, and in a bathroom that dust turns into a greasy film. Wipe it whenever the liner comes down, which is the only time it is convenient.

Metal rings mark the liner and eventually rust onto it. Plastic ones crack and drop the liner mid-shower. Rings with a small roller run more smoothly, which matters more than it sounds, because a liner that catches is a liner that gets left bunched. If the rod is a tension rod, take it down and check the wall where the ends press, since that is a common place for paint to lift.

When to stop washing it

A plastic liner that stays cloudy after a wash, or has black spotting that comes back within a fortnight, has growth inside the material rather than on it. Washing works briefly and then it returns, which is the signal that this one is finished.

Liners are cheap and this is not a failure. Somewhere between one and two years is normal, and shorter in a bathroom with poor ventilation. Trying to save a finished liner is the version of this that costs the most, because the bathroom keeps smelling and nobody can work out why.

If it keeps happening quickly

A liner that goes black within weeks of being replaced is telling you about the room rather than the liner. Either the fan is not moving air, or the room has no ventilation and the door stays shut, and both of those affect grout, seals, and paint as well.

That is worth checking before buying a third liner in six months, because the liner is the cheapest thing in the room and the first to show the problem.

The bathroom line by line is in the cleaning checklist, the rod and the tracks belong to deep apartment cleaning, and recurring apartment cleaning keeps the room from getting to the point where the liner is the least of it.