O by all means please do share!
First and foremost, you'll see a lot of videos (etc.) where these guys throw all the used socks in a container for weeks on end. That always leads to a nice stench and a nice collection of mold...
I have a square 4-gallon pail, and with every dirty batch of filter socks I do the following:
* Quick/cursory rinse, invert and hand scrub the felt (I just use my hands to rub the felt back and forth). This is just to get the worst of the gunk out.
* Take the filter socks and throw them in the pail with hot water and a half a scoop of oxyclean. Let soak for 48 hours, rinse and let dry. When dry, throw in a separate pail to await machine washing.
Then, when you have enough socks for a load, I run them on the following settings:
* Sanitary, heavy soil with one scoop of oxyclean.
* When done, revert the filter socks to normal and put on a second wash: Sanitary, regular, extra rinse, one scoop of oxyclean and a capful of Seachem Prime to get rid of any chlorine.
When done immediately remove to air dry for 24 hours, then into one of those flexible mesh nylon laundry bins. Note that these won't come out bright white like bleaching does, but they will be very clean and effective nonetheless.
You can use bleach (and some do), but as we also have vinegar around a lot for cleaning other stuff we wanted to avoid scenarios where bleach and vinegar can come into contact creating poisonous gas. And my wife uses oxyclean for all our other laundry so it keeps things simple (and the wife happy).
