As near as I can tell, the delicate setting on the washer means the agitator isn’t working quite so aggressively. This would seem to translate into the clothes getting a bit less abrasion. It should be enough to make a difference otherwise why would they even bother with the setting?
I stopped using the other cycle settings on the washer a few weeks ago (when I first thought about this) and haven’t noticed my clothes not getting clean so is there a reason not to do this?
But, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine why they’d make a setting with no real function: because you’ll assume it has a function and prefer that washer over a competitor that lacks it. The clothes-washing industry is full of products that have a marginal function.
On my washer the delicates get spun at a slower speed. The result is wetter clothes at the end. On normal, the spin is so fast that the clothes are significantly less wet.
Less wet means less time in the dryer which means less energy used.
On our old washer, the permanent press cycle had a pause for several minutes before the rinse cycle started. That was supposed to give the clothes a couple of minutes to cool down and “relax” so as not to set any wrinkles. I don’t know that it was any better than a regular warm wash/cold rinse cycle with no pause, but that was the rationale.
FWIW, I’ve used only the delicate cycle on all my laundry for about five years now. I haven’t noticed any difference in how dry/wet the laundry is after spinning, and I think it’s helped cut down on the “wear and tear” of the clothes.
I have noticed that serious ground-in dirt, like that on the knee areas of a boys pants, don’t get as clean. Myself, I don’t have that kind of dirt, just sweat and a occ foodstain, which I try to pre-treat. In fact, not only do I use “delicate” I use cold water.
However, once in a while, for my whites, I use regular cycle and hot, and yes, they come out cleaner. I even did a blind test.
The delicate cycle is just cold water and cold rinse and less washing time. I work at a laundromat. So I have seen many washers and know how they work. It has nothing to do with the agitator on the top loader and nothing to with the spin cycle on front loaders. Its all about temperature and time of the washing cycle.
I have a separate dial for the water temp for wash/rinse. Are you saying that it doesn’t function on this cycle? (I’m not at home to check this empirically.)
However, I can state categorically that, on my machine, the agitator doesn’t move as robustly on the delicate cycle as it does on the regular one.
I have to concur. While I can’t comment on the number of washers tpatsfan has seen, I’m quite certain that he has not seen mine. There is a little light that shows what speed spin will be used. I suppose the light could be lying to me, but really, why would it want to do that to me?
I don’t work in a laundromat, although I did use one once. I do own a front loader washing machine*, and as I had a load of laundry to put on anyway, I checked.
Regular cycle is run with a water temperature of 40C and spins at 1400RPM. It also weighs the load to determine run time, which it put at 132 minutes for the halfish-size load I just added.
Delicate cycle washes at 30C and spins at 800RPM. It doesn’t weigh the load to determine cycle length, it just defaults to 105 minutes.
Actually, at this moment I have three washing machines: his clapped out old front loader that is waiting to be transported to the garbage dump, my top loader which doesn’t fit in the laundry here and is being stored in the garage until I work out what to do with it, and our front loader which both washes things and fits in the laundry, unlike the other two.
Are you sure? I thought maybe he was washing one of these, which can get really dirty out there in the woods, y’know. I’m pretty sure it won’t get as clean as your whites, though, regardless of what temp you set.
Your washer taks over 2 hours to go through a single medium-sized load? I hope it’s a combination washer/dryer unit or else that makes no sense at all. A wash cycle should be something like 20-30 minutes!
When I went to college, I only wore stuff that was blue or black in color, and nothing that required special instructions.
I basically washed everything in warm water on the gentle cycle and then dried it on delicate in one big load. My undies might have come out a bit dingy, but I took care of that by wearing them on the inside of my pants, so no one noticed.
The gentle cycle in washing machines vary from machine to machine. Sometimes, it’s the water temperature. Sometimes it’s the amount of agitation. Sometimes, it’s the speed of the spin cycle. My feeling is with modern detergent, there’s probably very little need to use warm or hot water, and anything but the short delicate cycle.
The newer high efficiency machines don’t use as much water, so they take longer to wash and dry the clothes. We used top loading machines in the U.S. for years because they could get the wash done a lot quicker than front loading machines. Front loaders were more popular in Europe because they used less energy and were gentler on the clothes.
