Supposedly, soaking your clothing etc. in a tub full of hot water, and borax, washing soda, and detergent, will allow a bunch of stuff that has been sitting on your “clean” clothes, to be soaked away - yielding a tub full of soggy fabric and some rather scary-looking soaking water (yes, there are Youtube videos showing the process and yeah, it does look gross).
OK, I can buy that maybe it’s removing traces of fabric softener. But the rest… why would it work any better to get rid of detergent residue and body oils, than a run through the regular wash cycle?
Is this the laundry-day equivalent of ear-candling?
We don’t use fabric softeners of any kind, and I do use some Borax in my regular wash routine, so I’ll save my time and effort for more important stuff.
I use borax as a “laundry booster” and half the indicated soap for a load. It’s mostly water that does the work and if you put too much other stuff in with it, that other stuff doesn’t rinse very well.
The part that really startled me was the instruction to use a half cup of detergent: ooooookey? powdered detergent? liquid? and isn’t detergent residue one of the things you’re supposed to be trying to GET RID OF???
I don’t think I’ll bother - not that I was gonna, anyway. Maybe if our towels were getting… crunchy or something. But I suspect I’d just wash 'em in the machine, on hot.
I suppose it could be the enzymes in most detergent that are doing it, but it could just as easily be leaching dyes out of the fabric to color the water.
My gut feeling is that they’re making some manner of diluted borax slime, which is the major component of the skudgewater.
It feels like those shenanigans where you get somebody to eat a teaspoon of “bowel cleanser”, and then they fire it out the, ah, other end, and it’s all ropey and gross and you go, “Look, your bowels are gross!” When in truth, the stuff you fed 'em makes the grossness and it didn’t need an intestine in the first place.
How about try it once and then see if it makes any detectable difference. Does your laundry come out actually looking or feeling any cleaner that you can tell? Try the experiment and tell us your results and get your honorary (or maybe even genuine) Straight Dope Science Advisory Board certificate!
About once a month I’ll do a load of towels and washclothes and I’ll only add white vinegar as fabric softener and don’t add detergent at all. Similar to the following procedure. I have never used ammonia.
Boiling laundry with borax was what people used to do before washing machines. It’s how they got the linens clean.
Rather than ear candling, it sounds like another “ancient people had wisdom that has been lost,” type of thing. Like attributing all kinds of mystical properties to the Amish, when what they really are, are just people who really need showers, and whose pacifism does not extend to not yelling at their children.
It all actually makes sense - except the murky brown water in the tub once someone has done this process. Really, that’s the part that looks totally wacked out to me.
Isn’t '“Sitting in a tub full of hot water and laundry detergent” what happens when you put clothes in the washing machine? Laundry soda + borax will raise the pH a tiny bit, but not enough to matter, and will precipitate magnesium and calcium if the water is hard. Neither if which are particularly important for cleaning clothes.
If you want another test, see if the scary-looking soaking water is any scarier than what the washing machine pumps out (at the same level of clothes to water dilution).
I saw another website similar to the one linked, that also said a wash cycle in vinegar (then again in baking soda) would get towels fluffy and less scratchy. their logic was that the process got rid of hard water residue and the waxy buildup from those Bounce-type dryer sheets that are supposed to get your laundry smelling nice. Apparently those leave a waxy residue behind. (Our microfiber car cleaning cloths say to specifically not use these sheets). I haven’t tried it yet…
It was my experience with hand-washing that using detergent tended to result in brownish water no matter how dirty - or not- the clothing was. I wondered at the time whether detergent makers add something to make the water appear dirty so people think “Wow! It’s doing a great job!”
Definitely learned it was a real thing when we decided to do cloth diapers. At some point, the diapers started repelling liquid instead of absorbing it, and required treatment with something called RLR powder that restored their function by stripping off the buildup that had accumulated.
