Laundry

After posting a tongue -n-cheek narrative on Facebook about my experiences with stoves while living in Mexico, a few people, unknown to me, asked what I might know about washing machines. I have a dear friend in Denmark who sometimes calls to ask me what he can put in his machine. I've thought about this subject for years and the truth is I know too much but I am still never going to be considered an expert. I have had huge arguments in my life with lovers whom I thought had very odd relationships with washing machines. I have witnessed people pour in laundry soap never thinking the cap had a purpose --they went at it like laundry soap was water being emptied into the gullet of a desert thirsty cowboy resulting in so many soap bubbles in the window that 85 subsequent washes with no soap would still result in a soapy wash. If you're going to ask me I'd say a lot of people have a relationship with their washing machine that would be better worked out in therapy. You can tell a lot by how someone does their laundry.

An extrator or centrifuge

I love doing my laundry. As a child growing up in Inwood, going downstairs from our apartment to the laundry room on Saturdays was a treat for me. Women gathered in that seemingly dismal room to wash  clothes for their families. When bed sheets were ready for folding a women nearby would know when to waltz closer and take her ends of the sheet and fold with you, far apart at first, ending in a do-si-do insuring creases would be absent when later they were spread upon a bed. My favourite machine was the extractor or what may also be known as the centrifuge. It was always my job while doing laundry to find a towel that was large enough to place and tuck in on top insuring that everything stayed in place when gravity took over. You don't see this machine very much anymore but I am happy to say that many of the laundromats in NYC still use them. For me there was something magical about an extractor. Clothes went in seemingly too wet to ever dry and came out minutes later ready for the dryer. It was also the only machine on the premises that had warning labels all over it. It sat in laundromats like an atomic nuclear waste receptacle. You took your life in your hands - it was considered dangerous. Limbs could be lost if you touched it while it worked. Well... OK that's just how I remember things.

For a short time, during the passing of a long summer, and while a summer cottage was being built on Prince Edward Island our 'washing machine' was a hand pump at sink side, a washboard, and an old cast iron cooking stove where water was boiled for hot water for the whites. Washing clothes on a washboard in the dead of winter is a type of hell. It's painful and you do it muttering to yourself that when you are old enough you will live as a hobo never to wash again. 

In my twenties I stayed in The Bronx with a family that had previously done laundry with us on Saturdays back in Inwood. They had purchased their own home and in the basement sat this machine which for me was just a question of: Why?

I learned an enormous amount about doing laundry from this machine. Actually from the family that owned it. They would fill it up, put their clothes in and return a day or two later to begin the agitation part. Two days, I now know is too long a time to soak but the lesson learned is the process of soaking. I will break this down later. Their particular model had an electric wringer which meant your fingers and arms would get taken in with the article of clothing if you didn't pay attention. I asked once why in the world they didn't just get on with it and hit the agitation lever but the eldest daughter said: Soaking is primarily how your clothing gets clean.

Top loader with an agitator pol

When I was a young woman and at the beginning of my washing life I used powdered soap. The very best way to use powdered soap, if this is your preference, is to add it as the washer is filling and before you add your clothes. This ensures that the detergent is at the bottom of the machine. This is crucial if the machine you are using has an agitator pole or looks like this. This machine works by agitating your clothing downwards to the bottom. Clothes are cleaned by how many times they reach the bottom and are agitated (scrubbed, run over) against that swirly part. They are pulled down to the bottom, pushed out of the way by the descending clothing and then brought back up to the top and repeated, The other benefit of adding the soap first is that it won't have time to cake onto clothes that haven't gotten thoroughly soaked yet. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this type of machine and its simplicity of dials rather than electronics means it can be fixed almost into eternity. I lived in Vermont with a Maytag that had to have been a good forty years old, but it worked. The man who came to service it from time to time was a man in his late 60's. He told us that when he became a repair man this machine was one of his first jobs and when he first saw it it was already a few years old, he still had hair and was in his twenties. He said it was the oldest machine he tended to and wouldn't let anyone else take the service calls for our machine. I think he wanted to see who would live longest. 

If you are the kind of person that packs a machine like this then you are doing yourself and the machine a disservice. Your clothes will never get clean as there will never be enough space for anything to agitate freely and two, your machine interprets this in the same way your body brings on the 'gag reflex'. Once it has stopped you will notice that your clothes are presented back to you in such a fashion that requires one foot placed on the front of the machine while you tug at the tangled monstrosity you created. My ex packed the machine like this. He thought he was saving money on water. I just thought he was insane. Everything came out of the machine looking like the cats' regurgitated fur ball.

getting your money's worth

I suppose some people may also pack it like this because they imagine they are saving time to get it all in one load. I don't know what the reasoning is fully but I know that you are not getting the cleanest clothes possible and the best analogy I can come up with is, it's like being the last person to bath in the tub on Saturday when you lived in a family of six. 

Owning a washing machine is supposed to make your life easier. You still may have to iron things but you can iron quickly and easily or you can turn the chore into a pilates workout. 

When I began to make quilts I became concerned about the stress put on hand quilting by agitator poles. With a washing machine with an agitator pole you also load the machine by sort of draping your clothing around the pole. This ensures that the clothing gets caught in the groves and gets pulled downwards, but this method also puts strain on delicate items. This is about the same time I began to look at front loading machines which are also the type of machine most often seen in laundromats. They wash without the pole and instead wash by throwing your clothes around a bit more violently (like beating it on a rock). If you remember back to your powdered soap days you may also remember that at one time you were asked to use a cup or half a cup of powdered soap. Adding that same amount of soap to a front loader results in a Marx Brothers type of mishap where people have to be searched for amongst the bubbles. The timeline has been the better the machine, the less soap needed. Keep this in mind as we are going to end on the HE washing machine populating homes, including mine.

I think it bothers people psychologically to equate clean clothes with less water and less soap. Equally, it's sometimes difficult to teach an old dog a new trick. 

Clothing that you buy that has a label which reads: Dry Clean Only, should be strictly adhered to if you can't handle stress of any kind and can't think things through very well. I have handled every imaginable fabric and have great confidence in my understanding how various fabrics will behave when water is added. I have buckets of clothing that are labeled Dry Clean Only and I wash these items in the machine at the correct temp and for the correct amount of time. If you have skin allergies and sensitivities such as I do then you'd rather be stuck in jail for 24 hours than use a dry cleaning service. You will also notice that when using the services of a dry cleaner they are using industrial machines to iron your clothing flat which results in a very short time you may notice that areas like collars which have to be folded first before pressing, seem to wear in places not easily fixed because they are being 'pressed' against something else. There are slightly less toxic, at home, dry cleaning supplies available on Amazon which you use one of two ways. You either toss an entire item in the dryer with a sheet of dry cleaning chemical or it comes in packets like a towelette and use it to spot treat the dry-clean only item that has a spot on it that needs cleaning. Dryel is a popular brand.

So front loaders are all around better on keeping the integrity of your clothing intact, and they use less soap. The very down side to them is they too often do not have a soak cycle which translates to your machine cleaning your clothes the way your machine has been programmed to clean and if you don't like it, tough.  You want a machine that has enough options so that you can do what you want working with the capabilities of the machine. 

A Quick Trip Around The World

I have done laundry in Belfast, Dublin, Denmark, Norway, Germany, London, The USA, Canada, and Mexico. We can only divide that list up into two halves: The European machines versus the North American machine. If you really want a machine to fornicate with you will immediately move to Europe. Everywhere I went it was a common site to see a front loader in the kitchen. No dryer, but always a front loader. Clothes were dried on racks or radiators. Every European I have ever known turns their clothing inside out before tossing it into a machine. I am now ordering clothing from Europe and all the washing labels instruct me to turn my clothes inside out before placing them in a washer. I can hear someone in the back squirming and dying to mention that often when one does the laundry strange things are trapped on the inside and that if things are turned inside out that will mean those oddities will now be on the outside. Au Contraire. That weird stuff has to do with the fact that you own the largest collection of artificial fibers on the block. People are walking by you and their body hair slightly lifts until you are 30 meters away again. But I will say that it is static that is causing this issue and adding liquid fabric softener to the wash itself or a sheet into the dryer will somewhat alleviate this problem.

European washing machines take front loading ingenuity and combine it with soaking.  Beware though, there is really no such things as a quick wash in these machines. They have wash cycles that can easily run three hours or more but your clothes come out looking brand new. If you google European washing machines versus American you will hear the waste of water moaners. My attitude about that is we are still talking about solar energy and they've dealt with that decades ago. On some European wash panels you will see a cycle for wool. 

But mostly all of those little pictures that look like emojis on your clothing labels are actually used and transferred onto the control panel.  Universal laundry symbols are meant to advise the consumer to the very best way to clean an item. By law the first item listed does not mean it is the only way to clean an item. It just means it is the best. These symbols are universal and allow you to go beyond sorting your clothes from just dark to light.

European wash dial example

I know that that some people will never adhere to this kind of advice or instruction. They perceive doing laundry as idiot proof. Doing ones laundry may seem straightforward but if you've been doing your laundry the same way since you owned a top loader with an agitator pole but now own a HE machine you are most likely the problem and not the machine. 

HE MACHINES

I recently went out and purchased the HE model seen below. I read manuals but I am also human, stuck in some of my ways and prone to seeing if things are true for myself rather than going along with what everyone else says. If you look at the vast majority of complaints about HE washers they come from people who, insist upon doing laundry the same way that have always done laundry, are similar to my ex and stuff it to the gills with clothing articles or believe in their heart of hearts that less water has got to mean my clothes are not getting clean.

You need to remember that instead of draping your clothes around an imaginary non-existent pole you are instead going to load the machine as though you are making Monkey Bread. Do not drape anything ever. Take your pair of jeans and drop it in its own little heap all by itself at 12 o'clock, your next pair of jeans goes in the same fashion at 6 o'clock. So on, and so forth keeping your little piles evenly weighted. DO NOT DRAPE. The second thing that I would advise is to not go up further than 3/4 from the top. A front loader machine will advise you to not load above the three last lines at the back the machine drum. Those three lines of holes let you know when your machine is full on a front loader. A top loading washing machine with no agitator pole or half pole, is a front loading washing machine for people who find it difficult to bend over

I ignored all of the manual instructions the first time using my new machine and it resulted in every single complaint others had. Clothes in a knot, suspicious stains, etc, I don't have this problem anymore.

I was in Belfast the first time I used a laundry pod. I thought they were little puffy miracles, and they are in some ways, but they also gunk up the innards of your machine. Prior to purchasing my new HE machine I never thought about what the pouch is made from (it's plastic and it's a no-no). With a HE machine the pod doesn't perform as it should because it require the vigorous motion of a front loader or pole type agitator to work well. HE machines don't use that level of commotion to get clothes clean so you will often find remnants of the pouch stuck somewhere on your newly washed. My HE machine specifically states that these pouches can not be placed in the dispenser because there is even less commotion in those trays and they just won't dissolve properly.  I see people add soap to the machine all of the time by just pouring it in and skipping the measurement lines on the cap. By doing this you ar wasting your money. If the label says you will get 60 loads from the container that should last you at 4 loads a week around 3.5 months. You have to think about the entire picture. The soap says measure before use, the machine tells you too much soap leads to a service call and you sit there telling anyone that will listen that your machine is the culprit. My boyfriend used to tell me: Moira, you can't break a computer unless you throw it on the floor. It can't do anything unless you instruct it to do something. 

So what if you prefer a more organic gentler detergent because you are sensitive? It is your underwear that you have concerns about-- an item that actually touches you? No one has a larger bigger uglier tactile disorder than me and for the items that touch me in a personal direct way I wash things in baby detergent and sometimes I skip soap all together. If your machine has a second rinse cycle use it to rinse out the soap you may have concerns about. Baking soda cleans as well as vinegar but elastic and vinegar don't get on too well. Dr. Bronner's castile soap line and their Sal Suds can be used in machines as well and are used considerably by those of us with sensitive skin.

The last thing I want to say about HE machines is using them in the tropics. My machine will notify me when it is time for a clean out. The manual claims I can do it in one of two ways: bleach or a Stay Fresh tablet. I have already done it with bleach. And the light went on after about 20 loads rather than the higher number it calculated which leads me to believe that the high mineral content in my water is going to necessitate more frequent internal cleaning. The manual says that this specific cleaning is to rid the insides, that I can't see, of gunk, muck, residue and odor. Everything went well with the bleach but then I looked at what bleach does versus this Stay Fresh tablet. This Stay Fresh tablet is kind of like a dishwasher pellet that kind of has a bit of a blasting component to it like the old dishwasher powders that eventually left your glasses looking like sea glass it was so strong. In the Yucatan where I live I don't think bleach is going to cut it. I think I need something a little more vicious behind the scenes. Some people have water softeners and enough money to set on fire during hootenannies but some of us have absolutely no plans to tear up their homes to accommodate a washing machine but if you are just now designing a home this may be an option you choose if you live in the tropics or in hard waters areas. 

SOAKING

Soaking is your best friend. Here's the but. Don't soak elastic, wool or silk. Soaking is best suited to cotton that is filthy with embedded ground in dirt, like sheets (that spot in the center of the bottom sheet that seems darker than the perimeter), socks, denim, pillow cases.

I just read a survey that stated Australians wash their sheets every six months to once a year. I'll just let that sentence linger where it is. 

Too much soaking leads to rot so returning days later as my friend did is really a bad idea. Too much soaking breaks down natural fibers plus it turns the water foul smelling. I'd say two hours maximum. If you soak for two hours run it through a cycle and determine it still needs soaking. Soak it again. Don't put anything in the dryer until you are happy with the way it is clean. All dryers do to a stain is lock the stain in and make it permanent. As long at the stain has remained wet you have time to work with it. It is sometimes difficult but if your clothing gets stained with anything your best bet is to get it dealt with ASAP.

If you can find Tide Pens, they are the best. It is like a Sharpie but instead of ink you rub the pen into the stain which is loaded with detergent.  It erases the stain, and keeps it covered with detergent until you can get home and toss it in the machine. It's the size of a pen and will fit in a purse or back pocket.

I hope this has been helpful to someone and now, if you don't mind, I'm going to get back to other things.