Taking down your bounce house when the sun is setting is never a positive moment for a party. Although your guests may be sad that the bouncing and excitement is done for the day, always keep in mind that tomorrow will be another fun day for bouncing, inside or outside, and will be here sooner than you think. However, if you are not careful in the takedown and storage steps, you could potentially end up causing accidental, yet still serious harm to your bounce house. Proper storage in a safe, clean, and dry location is an absolute must, and shoddy storage can eventually lead to mold, mildew, and significant problems with inflating your bounce house in the future.

When packing up and storing your bounce house for the day, or for however long it is before you should use it again, you have to make sure that you are doing so properly. This includes completely deflating the bounce house, rolling it up, and packing it, as well as the accessories, into the storage bag so that no piece is sticking out. Once the pieces have been placed into the bag, you must then store your bounce house inside, under a sturdy roof, where the bounce house and its extra accessories are not at all susceptible to the outside. If you were to store your bounce house outside in poor weather conditions, the formation of mold and mildew on your inflatable device would be practically inevitable.

However, it’s not just outside storage that can cause the formation of mold. Improper indoor storage can be just as dangerous to the inflatable device. If your indoor storage location, like a garage or basement, is prone to leaks from the ceiling or the floor, the water can soak through the storage bag and start to affect your bounce house in the process. Your storage bag may be compact, but it can’t stand up a constant stream of water from the ceiling or a steady bath in flood water. As a result, your bounce house will end up as if you left it soaking wet after a rainstorm, even in the supposed comfort of storage. But, the damage that mold can cause to bounce houses does not end there.

By storing the bounce house in this manner, the bounce house is now susceptible to serious structural risk, which can not only lead to mold and mildew forming, but can also lead to delaminating. Delaminating, or delamination, is a process that causes the interior pieces of an object to split up into thin strips, causing the object to malfunction. Although it may be an infrequent scenario, delamination is a situation that can strike your bounce house as well, whether you’re prepared for it or not. On occasion, a bounce house can experience delaminating as a result of old age; by old age, this typically refers to at least a decade after purchase and steady, frequent use. However, as a result of poor, careless storage, the delaminating can set in at a far earlier stage, almost entirely as a result of neglect. The mold and mildew will not only affect the outside layers of your bounce house’s fabric: it will affect the inside pieces as well. As a result, the bounce house will become all but impossible to properly inflate from there on. You may think that the problem lies with the blower when the bounce house fails to inflate properly at your next event, but it could be any number of faulty causes. It can’t be stressed enough how important it is to properly store and clean your bounce house every single time you use it. As big and towering as a bounce house may be when fully inflated, and as fun and entertaining as it may appear, they are still objects that must be shown great care and responsibility. Anything less than that, and you might need to replace your bounce house far sooner than you expected to.