Out of habit, I typically use bleach when washing my whites (undershirts, for the most part), and I often use Clorox 2 or some equivalent for my colors. My wife never got into that habit and almost never uses either one. We both use a stain stick for spot cleaning. And of course we’re using detergent.
Are these treatments worthwhile or unnecessary for my regular laundry needs? My undershirts eventually get dingy despite my use of bleach, and I’m not sure if the bleach is extending their useful life or adding nothing to the process. I have no idea whether the color-safe bleach does anything at all.
I’m of the mind that adding additional chemicals, especially one as powerful and caustic as bleach, is most likely ultimately shortening the lifespan of clothes.
I use just the fragrance-free detergent and my clothes come out just fine.
I tend to agree that bleach will shorten fabric life, it’s a very strong oxidizer. It is good for disinfecting, and perhaps for getting stains out of white things.
I never tried the color safe bleach stuff. I like the one detergent for all method.
Too much hassle for me. And given that I’m the only one who sees my undershirts, I don’t mind them getting a bit dingy. (And, as I have a bad habit of gnawing on their collars, I tend to chew them up before they have a chance to anyway.)
I haven’t used bleach in 20 years. I throw Borax in my whites, and sometimes colors just to perk 'em up a little. Bleach is too harsh and a PITA to deal with.
My daughter is a big fan of bleach, and almost everything she owns has bleach spots. She says she’s careful, but either she’s not, or the bleach isn’t totally rinsing out of the washing machine.
I don’t use it and my whites stay white until they wear out or until I’m sick of them. Except for the bottoms of my white socks, and nobody sees those anyway.
I use bleach on my towels and sheets, and a couple of times a year I bleach underwear & socks. Otherwise I wash everything in cold water without bleach.
Bleach is definitely hard on fabrics, which is why I don’t bleach clothes, but it’s a tradeoff I am willing to make to get body oils and sweat out of the towels & sheets.
I use hot water, a dab of concentrated whatever’s cheapest when I bought it detergent, and no bleach. I find hot water to be nicely effective for whatever might have body oils or whatever, like a nightshirt I wore a couple too many times before washing again, and bedsheets.
The concentration of bleach it would take to kill contaminants would ruin any but all-white clothes and definitely shorten fabric lifespan. Since I work in the veterinary field and have pets, hot washes and especially hot dryer will kill stuff I’m worried about, like fleas and other things that hatch. I also shop second-hand clothing and am an apartment dweller - hot dryer time helps with a lot of things. Bleach, not so much.
I only use bleach on bleach safe cloth when I think the cloth really needs it. I’ve been using old cloth diapers (the rectangular kind, not the prefolded and preshaped kind) for warm moist compresses for about 10 days, and since the wound was infected and was oozing some blood, I used bleach for them. I threw them in with my regular load of towels. I only use white towels, by the way.
I do a hot bleach load every week. Mostly towels, but also any light clothes that have stains and, most importantly, my son’s favorite stuffed animal, the nose of which he chews all week. It gets pretty gross by week’s end, and I was finding that a normal wash wasn’t killing the odor. He actually has two, though he doesn’t know that, and we rotate them out, washing one and giving it a week to dry out.
But I do like the way that white towels come out WHITE when you bleach them, and I like the way they smell (unscented bleach), and bleach is cheap, and what do I care if my $4 towels last 5 years or 6 years?
I use chlorine bleach like Clorox on dirty rags and towels that I use for such things as washing or working on the car. I’ll also wash these items in hot water with a regular detergent. I might even second rinse them.
I’ll sometimes use a color safe, non-chlorine bleach, like Clorox2 for clothing that allows it and is rather dirty.
For the most part I don’t use bleach and use a ‘free’ detergent with cold or warm water. For technical clothing, such as KoolMax shirts, I don’t use fabric softener or dryer sheets.
I use bleach on the whites, and yes, I do notice a difference when my husband does the laundry and doesn’t use bleach. Side by side with last week’s bleached socks, the cleaned without bleach socks look cleaner. My mom uses a TSP soak for all the white socks, and that gets them insanely clean, but I just can’t be arsed to go that far (and TSP isn’t easy to find in my city.)
I don’t use color safe bleach, though, mostly 'cause my mom didn’t. I will use borax on colors that seem to have gotten dingy. Dingy is mostly body oils which have grime glommed onto them, and borax, like bleach, breaks down even old body oils so they release the grime. Unlike bleach, it doesn’t lighten or spot colors. Why don’t I use borax on the whites? I have no idea. (Is borax “color-safe bleach”? Is “color-safe bleach” borax? It occurs to me that I really don’t know.)
Both are cheaper than detergent per use; I don’t use a whole lot of detergent - about 1/3 of what the little measuring cap would suggest. But I do use Tide or Whisk, because those consistently come out on top for Consumers Reports. When I was poor, I’d try using whatever cheap stuff was on sale, but just like the television ad says, I’d have to use three times as much, and the stuff still didn’t look clean. It really didn’t end up any cheaper per use, just per ounce.
