I’ve been bombarded of late with ads from Earth Breeze for their laundry detergent sheets. I like the concept but I wonder how good the product is. Being frugal, I’m reluctant to buy based solely on their ads. I know none of you will steer me wrong.
Have you ever used any brand of a similar product? What’s your verdict?
Been using them for many years, a must-have road trip item for me. They work perfectly well for me, but my clothes don’t get all that dirty. My current stock is Homevative brand from Amazon.
I use these In one size package or scent or another; I’m not fussy about the details.
I’ve used these for about 2 years now. They clean as well as any other detergent I have ever used. They are very compact, lightweight, and convenient. Just toss it in with the clothes and push [start].
The only very minor downside is that you must be very careful to not get them wet. They dissolve into a mess very quickly if you handle them with more-than-damp hands.
I am slightly annoyed by their advertising. A box labeled “up to 120 loads” like my example actually contains 60 sheets. Each perforated to be easily torn in half. If you use a half-sheet, yes, it’s a 120 load box. If you use a full sheet, it’s a 60 load box. IME a set of sweaty stinky bedsheets or badly soiled work clothes benefits from a full sheet. Half a sheet is plenty for any ordinary laundry. I’ve taken to pre-tearing all of them in half when I open the box. Helps me not absent-minded use 2x as much as needed.
Can recommend. I don’t pay attention to what laundry soap costs. I expect these are not the cheapest possible soap. But avoiding spills and cleanup is easily worth the few dollars per year. IMO IME YMMV.
Yes, I use Earth Breeze unscented. It seems to work well for me, but my laundry is not challenging, and I have an old-fashioned Maytag washer, which could possibly make a difference. I use one sheet for most loads, one and a half sheets if there’s something very dirty in it, and I do use a pre-treatment spray (Shout), which may also make a difference. I have always used Shout, even before I switched to detergent sheets.
I like how tidy they are to use, how light weight they are, and how little storage space they take up. I like that they use no plastic. Those plus they seem to do a perfectly cromulent job with my laundry. I did have a problem one time when I had a very small load, and set the water usage to a small amount too, and the half sheet didn’t dissolve due to not enough water. So, lesson learned, if I have another small load I will call it Medium sized and that works fine.
As for cost, I’m not the type to figure out the cost of load per unit or package of detergent, but it stands to reason it would be cheaper: no plastic jug or tub, no other plastic, you don’t have to pay for shipping of water (a large amount of the contents of a laundry detergent jug). It’s just concentrated detergent in a sheet. Looking back on my last order, I got 180 average loads for $40 + tax. That’s maybe 23 cents per load. Tide pods are a little over 24 cents per pod. Arm & Hammer Free & Clear claims to be 105 loads for $9, but for me liquid detergent is notoriously difficult to measure accurately, usually those lids are not very well marked (IMO, of course).
I typically do 3-4 loads per week, and while I’ve been using liquids, I honestly don’t know how long a bottle lasts. I’m pretty sure I don’t get however many loads the bottle claims, but even if the “100 loads” turned out to be 50, that’s still about 4 months, more or less.
As long as I can get fragrance-free - I don’t like my laundry to smell floral or piney or fresh linen or whatever. For the most part, we’re not excessively dirty, but I do occasionally use a pre-wash spray as needed.
I got some free to try out. Worked fine. Better than pods, IMHO, safer at least.
(Yes, some kids ate Tide pods thinking they were a sort of candy, yes, i have given cites for this several times- believe it or not. Not to mention the idiotic “tide pod challenge”)
Yeah i dont get this idea of adding massive amounts of scent to the laundry. For my sheets i do use lavender scented dryer sheets otherwise unscented.
The Arm & Hammer brad has a fragrance free version. I have no particular brand allegiance. That happens to be the one and only brand I’ve ever seen in the stores I shop. So it’s what I buy.
I don’t understand this fascination for new-fangled stuff. I just use Tide Oxy liquid detergent, in way less than half the amount “recommended” by the instructions on the bottle, and everything comes out clean. With an extra rinse to make sure there’s no detergent residue.
If everything works, why would I switch to something else?
I too use Earth Breeze unscented. I have for years. Mostly, I like the idea of no plastic jugs. They work fine for me but, like for Roderick_Femm, my laundry isn’t very challenging. I’m not slaving away out on the back forty, coming home covered in mud and grass stains.
The Wirecutter section of the New York Times ran an article about laundry detergent sheets a couple of years ago. It said, “But after researching and testing laundry detergent sheets from five different companies, we found they were uniformly poor cleaners, especially compared with the liquid, powder, and pod detergents we recommend. Also, the ingredients and manufacturing processes used to make laundry sheets may not be as sustainable as the companies claim.” The article says that the products are mostly made in China so getting them here requires a lot of travel. And the sheets contain polyvinyl alcohol, the same polymer that laundry pods are wrapped in.
Plus I really doubt these products are cheaper than the liquid or powder detergents.
Tide has a new 6 layer thing called EVO.
Looks like Trump’s ear pillow after he got nicked(not to bring that in, but I care more than I do about teens daring and doing the Tide pod challenge).
For me it was that powders are messy and large boxes are hard to store in my constrained space. Large jugs of liquid are also hard to store. Single-serving pods involve using about 3x as much detergent as is actually needed and come in the same oversized jugs that are hard to store.
So each of those product classes has significant drawbacks I wanted to get away from. When I stumbled upon a novel product in my local grocery store I gave it a try. And it does the basic cleaning job just as well with none of the drawbacks. What would be stupid is continuing to put up with the drawbacks of the old way(s), blindly assuming they can’t be helped.
A full box of 70 half-sheets weighs about 6 ozs ~=170g and is ~7.5 x 5.5 x 1.5" ~= 19 x 15 x 4cm. That tucks neatly into the tiny cranny I have available for such things.
Mini Mouse going into the college dorm had laundry detergent in her shopping list. I got her some laundry sheets, despite some of the other Dorm Moms being vehemently opposed. Her roommate brought liquid.
The liquid remained unused, as did any powder that any girls had brought. Everyone was ordering sheets after the first week. We went to visit the first October and we went to do laundry. It’s a huge laundry facility, hundreds of machines. No kid we saw was using liquid or powder. All sheets or pods.
But she’s moving into an apartment with a washer en suite. So no lugging your laundry 1/4 mile and up and down stairs. She says she’s switching to liquid because it cleans better. And she needs liquid for spot cleaning stains.
I was in college forty years ago and had to cross the quad to the nearest dorm with a laundry room. So weight was a concern. At the time one detergent brand sold powdered detergent in a sachet or envelope made of dryer sheet material. So I could carry one or two of those easily.
I use the sheets from time to time. Not normally, but I use them when I travel. I think I paid $10 for 60 or so loads. They work well enough for me, I haven’t noticed them not cleaning.
As LSLGuy said, don’t get them wet, and that kind of means keeping them them in a drier area. Mine got somewhat wet I think just from the water in the air and they half stuck together.