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@lemon-drps has started an argument in TAFP about measuring laundry detergent so
Do you measure your detergent before you put it in the washing machine?
Yes. I’m not a neanderthal
No… wait… how do you measure detergent?
No. That’s what detergent pods are for
I dont do laundry i just want to see the poll answers
fwiw homemade laundry soap is not going to kill you or break your washing machine or fail to clean your clothing or any of the other horror stories you’ve heard
yes, if you strip clothes washed in homemade laundry soap the water looks disgusting. it also looks disgusting if you strip clothes washed in commercial detergent. it looks disgusting because the stripping solution makes the water highly alkaline, which decreases solubility, so everything that would normally dissolve doesn’t. also, stripping water looks disgusting because trace amounts of dye seep into the water, which is why colored laundry stripped always looks grosser than white laundry stripped
yes, homemade laundry soap doesn’t make your whites look as white as commercial detergent, but that isn’t because it’s not cleaning them, it’s because commercial detergents contain optical brighteners or bluing to make the colors look brighter to the human eye. you can replicate that effect by soaking your whites in lemon juice before washing, or letting them soak in the machine overnight, or adding baking soda, lemon juice, hydrogen peroxide, or borax to the wash. or just by hanging them outside to dry if you’re not allergic to all outdoor things like i am.
yes, homemade laundry soap can build up on fabric sometimes, depending on the hardness of your water and the recipe you use. this can easily be remedied by adding a half cup of white vinegar to the machine in your rinse cycle. this also softens clothes.
homemade laundry soap is mostly harmless
Hey!! I'm from England and everyone I know either has their washer in their kitchen (most commonly) or they have a small room connected that it's in (that's p rare for me though)
i guess i’m just confused on what y’all mean by IN your kitchen? is it like this:
or this?
cause the second one is actually decently common here in the states too. but we don’t count that as being “in” the kitchen, i guess?
My experience of washer and dryer locations have been near the kitchen, either in a different smaller room attached to the kitchen, a closet, or in a different room that acts as a pantry/storage of cleaning supplies and light-bulbs/hallway to the garage. Like, the one time they aren't is in my friends house. The kitchen is on one side of the house, and the washer and dryer is in the middle of the house while also being in a hallway that leads to their backyard.
Yeah, I’ve seen that plenty. It’s also pretty common to have that arrangement too, now that I think about it. Is that what brits mean when they say they’re washer/dryer units are “in” the kitchen??
So Laundry Discourse Exists
Because I promised I’d tell this story last night.
Lately, I’ve looked into making my own laundry detergent because finding laundry stuff that both contains no animal products and isn’t tested on animals in small town Indiana is an exercise in frustration and I don’t have the stamina for it. One of my first acts in 2017 was to Google image search “homemade laundry detergent” because a lot of people put theirs in these cute jars and I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.
This is how I discovered that homemade laundry detergent is a CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE.
And not even for the reasons you’d think, like people being all “I’m not going to sit down and GRATE BARS OF SOAP to save money” or whatever. No, this is a matter of SCIENCE.
What it comes down to is there’s this thing called “stripping” your laundry, which, from what I can gather, used to be a thing to get rid of mineral buildup on fabric from very hard water, but now mostly exists to give new moms using cloth diapers one more thing to worry about.
(Incidentally, I have also learned that CLOTH DIAPER DISCOURSE is a booming industry with many websites devoted to telling you why you’re sopping up your child’s filth ALL WRONG.)
How stripping laundry works is you take your clean laundry and dump it in the washing machine or bathtub or what have you. Then fill the container halfway with hot water, and add your mineral removal solution. You can either buy this solution or make your own using Borax, washing soda, and Calgon.
Borax, washing soda, and Calgon. Remember that for later.
So then you let the clothes soak for about four hours, stirring every forty-five minutes or so, and the water gets all murky and horrific with all the evil you’re stripping out of the fabric, and then you take the clothes and run them through a wash cycle in your machine using only water, which, if hard water was your problem in the first place, seems really counter-intuitive.
ANYWAY so somewhere along the line people using cloth diapers decided that the diapers weren’t as white and didn’t absorb as much after repeated uses, and then was the result of detergent buildup on the clothing (I’d have figured it was the result of, you know, repeated use wearing things out, but I’m an idiot who doesn’t know anything about parenting). So if you truly want your cloth diapers to be clean and your baby’s skin to be protected from harsh detergent chemicals, you have to strip your cloth diapers! Because why not add one more battle to the Mommeigh Wars to stress women out?
(Incidentally, my sister and I lived through our cloth diapers never being “stripped.” Of course, I also lived through having mine dried on a clothesline outdoors despite being allergic to every outdoor thing ever, so yeah.)
‘But Lauralot,’ you may be thinking, ‘what do horrible commercial chemicals have to do with homemade laundry detergent?’ Thank you for providing that segue!
So homemade laundry detergent has become a thing recently, probably as a combination of the recession, doomsday preppers, and Pinterest, and then some people decided they didn’t like homemade laundry detergents, and judging from the tone of various websites I’ve seen (there are WEBSITES devoted to this), some of the ones who don’t like it have made it a crusade to tell you why it’s the devil and will probably make your washing machine break and your family die.
So if you “strip” your laundry washed in homemade detergent, the water looks gross! I mean, it looks gross if you do it with commercial detergent too, but shut up, this is clearly because homemade detergent is SCIENTIFICALLY INCAPABLE OF CLEANING CLOTHING.
Why is that, you may ask? Well I found a long blog post that explained it scientifically in that when people make homemade laundry detergent, that the active cleaning ingredient is grated soap, and soap is completely different from detergent because detergent has surfacants that let it clean your clothes without sticking to them, but soap surfacants don’t work that way for some reason I wasn’t paying attention to and the other things in homemade detergent just soften water and can’t possibly clean the horrible evil soap residue from your clothing so your clothes are FILTHY WITH SOAP AND MINERALS, LOOK AT THE STRIPPING PICTURES, SEE THE TRUTH.
At this point because it was like one in the morning and everything was funny to me, I hopped on over to Discord to ask @nicrosil, who works with pool chemicals, about all this, because pool chemicals and laundry chemicals actually have a lot in common.
So anyway, @nicrosil explained that homemade detergent typically uses castille soap, with the active ingredient of lye (sodium hydroxide), which has a high pH. The Borax (sodium tetraborate decahydrate) and washing soda (sodium carbonate) used in the stripping solution also have high pHs. So regardless of any preexisting carbonate buffers in the water, when you add all those things together, you end up with a solution with a high pH, and as the pH increases, water solubility decreases. So things that normally dissolve in water don’t, and you end up seeing a bunch of crap you wouldn’t otherwise, because that’s how chemical solutions work, and not necessarily because ALL FILTH ALL THE TIME.
(Also I notice that in every picture of stripped laundry, the murk in the water is always MUCH darker with colored laundry than with white, so I’m wondering if some of this isn’t just trace amounts of dye leaking out into the water).
But this is the part that was really funny to me, because ninety percent of homemade laundry detergent recipes I’ve seen only consist of three ingredients, those being castille soap, Borax, and washing soda. BORAX AND WASHING SODA. The two water softening agents you can’t possibly trust to wash away the soap, unless you’re using them to strip the laundry post-wash, and then for some reason it’s fine?
Now in fairness, the comments of the big long post about the evils of homemade detergent went into some thing about why soap surfacants are completely different from detergent surfacants and why Borax and washing soda work in stripping but not in homemade detergent but halfway through, the post turned into an advertisement for some eco company’s detergent with a suspicious lack of any stripping pictures following washes in this commercial detergent, so I lost interest and also it was about 1:30 in the morning and I was tired.
So yeah. That’s how I started 2017, by learning about LAUNDRY SOAP DISCOURSE and the effort women will go to in order to make other women feel like crap about their homemaking skills. It was really funny to me last night, so I sure hope it holds up for anyone reading this in the day. And if not, my apologies.
Wild the things I'm learning about my dad now that he's retired. I'm 99% sure he puts his jeans in the dryer. Never knew that before because he only ever had like 1 pair, and you don't need to wash jeans that often, so I never noticed how he dried them. He had slacks for work and shorts for home and jeans were just for running errands on Saturdays. Now he's only wearing slacks to church, so he bought a bunch of jeans to wear everywhere else, and he's washing them all the time because he's always doing art or something outside and they get dirty.
another thing about having your own laundry in your unit: you can easily break up the task around other things you're doing
toss the laundry in the washer (this takes 157 seconds max)
do some cooking, fold other laundry, do other cleaning, do yoga, take a nap, sleep all night, whatever
sometime hopefully within 12-24 hours (or immediately after the washer is done, you do you): move laundry from washer to dryer, or hang it on the line or on racks
meanwhile, again do other stuff until the drying is done
if the laundry isn't in-unit, you've got to be on top of it so nobody messes with your laundry
no slacking, be there when it's done, and if you really don't trust others around the laundry machines, be there the entire time it's running
but in the home? start and do other continue and do other
(wash & fold places unless right next door require two round trips to them, though i guess you could do one leg at the same time as another trip depending on direction, but let's not pretend it's actually more convenient than in-home)
am I horrible for putting my clothes in the dryer before the person ahead of me if they extended their wash time and have 2 min left when I'm done? The other dryer had 12 min on it left so they'll only be waiting 10. Idk, I ran up the stairs before they showed up, hopefully they run late getting their wet clothes.
