My gf has always been a bit critical of my laundry habits. We each do our own laundry. She does the traditional style where she does separate loads of whites, delicates, colors, etc, while I just throw everything together into one load, including dry-clean-only. She seethes over the fact that my clothes come out fine.
On Monday she came home from work and saw that I was doing my laundry. We had run out of laundry detergent that weekend, so she assumed I’d purchased more and planned on doing some of her laundry after dinner. But here’s the thing; I started doing my laundry before I noticed the lack of detergent, so I was doing a load of t shirts and Hawaiian shirts without detergent. I used the long cycle meant for soiled clothing.
When she was unable to find the detergent she asked where it was and I told her there wasn’t any. She freaked out that I did a load without soap, but it didn’t seem like such a big deal to me. I do not get dirty. I wake up, shower, dress, then go to work for 5 hours max. When I come home I shower and change. She freaked even more when I defended my soap-less load. Later, I challenged her to go through my closet and identify which shirts were washed without soap, and she was unable to tell the difference.
So, was my laundry situation a debacle, fiasco, or atrocity?
I read an article a while back, in Consumer Reports I think, about laundry detergent, or maybe it was washing machines. They looked at the clothes that came out of the washing machine, and found that there was a lot of soap residue left after the rinse cycle. They used ultraviolet light to detect soap residue.
As I recall they explicitly stated that you could wash your clothes 3 or 4 times without soap before all the soap was gone from the clothes.
After reading that, it has been my habit to only use half the amount of laundry detergent that the manufacturer recommends for each load.
It was a big money saver, instead of spending $30 a year on laundry detergent, I spend $15. Whoo-hoo, I’m rich!
Here’s an old Cecil Adams column on the subject of “laundry balls” which were plastic balls that supposedly cleaned your clothes in the washing machine without the use of detergent. The result of investigation by Cecil, Consumer Reports and others was that clothes get reasonably clean even with plain water in the washing machine. One possible explanation is residual detergent from previous washing machine cycles.
“Residual soap” may explain the great results I got. I also never use dryer sheets (my gf does) and yet my clothes never have problems with static. I assume my gf’s dryer sheet use coats the dryer drum.
I use Irish Spring soap and toothpaste, but if I go camping and for some reason forget soap/toothpaste, I’d still wash and brush as it’s “better than nothing”.
I use very little laundry detergent on my clothes. Too much makes me itchy. Even the non-allergenic ones. Like the OP, I rarely get real dirty. Towels and bed linens get a 1/2 bleach for sanitary reasons.
I use very little soap on my body for the same itchy reasons.
Op, you’re not atrocious.
I quit sorting, too, except for lighter-weight from heavy since the former dry faster. I’m baffled, though, by why she cares since she acknowledges that yours are just as clean as hers.
I never used laundry sheets except as mosquito repellent. No one else does in our house, so it’s not residual wax. No static other than wool socks, but everything else is cotton. I do have a few items that I hang to dry.
I say it’s fine as long as you’re washing only your own clothes without soap and not hers, too. As long as they come out clean, you’re the only person it should matter to.
Those soaps which claim to make clothes “whiter than white” are specifically formulated to leave residue: the residue is what changes the clothes’ color to a veeeery-slightly bluish shade which people interpret as “super white”.
I don’t sort, but only wear shirts and underclothes once and pants and socks twice before washing them. I use natural Method soap, but only half the recommended amount. Clothes come out clean.
Another vote for the effects of residual soap and no one should have a problem with what you did.
Most of the time, people are putting too much soap in even if it’s the recommended amount. This is what keeps the residual soap going.
But that’s “most of the time”. When you have truly dirt covered clothes, you need a decent amount of soap. So if you’ve working in dirt, etc. then the recommended amount is needed.
That cracks me up. I used to drive this girl up the wall with my relatively lax attitude on strict laundry procedures, with little or no adverse effects compared to her by-the-book methods.
On my prehistoric ( early 1990s ) top loader, I’ve always noted that on rinse cycles, toward the end of it, that the water still looks too soapy to be a proper rinse. So much so, after the rinse cycle and centrifugal drain, I’ll do the rinse cycle again sometimes. I also note that despite using liquid detergent sparingly, the water was very soapy, seemingly out of proportion to what I added.
For sure I could do at least a medium size wash sans detergent if I had to and have reasonably sanitary laundry.
