Cleaning your tanning bed should be something you do regularly as you would change the oil in your car. By cleaning your tanning bed regularly, you will keep dust and dirt off of the lamps and acrylics which can cause the tanning performance to diminish.

How can the performance of a tanning bed diminish by not cleaning it?

The tanning lamps produce ultraviolet light. This light has to pass through the lamp, the acrylic and then it is absorbed by your body. If the tanning lamps have a lot of dust collecting on them as well as your tanning acrylic, then the amount of UV light from the tanning lamps can be reduced by up to 10 percent if everything is dirty inbetween. Imagine getting 10 percent better tanning results every time the tanning bed was used?

What to do?

The first thing you need to do is remove the tanning acrylics. These are the clear plastic sheets that cover the tanning lamps. Once these acrylics are removed, then you should remove all the tanning lamps. This may seem tedious, but I guarantee that your results will be a lot better. Once these items have been removed, you should take a clean damp cloth and wipe down the reflector (reflective surface usually under the tanning lamps). This reflector helps reflect the ultraviolet light back up towards the body. If this reflector is covered in dust, then you will not get the best performance of this tanning bed and lamps.

Once you wipe down the reflector, you also want to wipe down each and every lamp. Some of the dirtier lamps I've seen have this dust caked on them and might take a few wipes to remove it. Put the tanning lamps back into your tanning bed and proceed to wipe down the insides of the tanning acrylics. Once you have the acrylics clean, you can put those back on as well.

A ballast tray is the components tray usually found underneath the tanning bed. This tray holds the electrical components, ballasts, etc. These ballast trays usually fill up with dust if not paid attention to. You should open up your ballast trays every few months and use a shop vac to vacuum up all of the dust building up on the components. The danger with leaving all this dust building up here is that if there is an electrical spark, it could ignite the dust and catch fire.