This is not a sponsored or affiliate post.
I recently finished the book, Laundry Love, by Patric Richardson. Honestly, with over 40 years of experience in doing laundry, I still learned some useful tips for washing clothes. Today, I’m sharing a few of the laundry gems and tips I learned from Patric’s book and will add more tips in a future post or two. There’s just so much good information!
wash and rinse everything in warm water.
If your washer is newer, you have many options available to wash your clothes. Do you really know which options are the best for the clothing you are washing? After reading Laundry Love I have new confidence in all my washing choices! Here are a few tips I learned that I hope will make your decisions easier.
Everything should be washed and rinsed with warm water. Darks, delicates, everything. Patric explains why: “the cold water in our homes is just 53 or so degrees, and cold-water detergents are made to work in 58-62 degree water. That means that our cold water setting isn’t warm enough to dissolve our detergents, and our clothes aren’t getting clean. If you place an item you recently washed in cold water and toss it into truly warm water it will suds up. That means that the soap is still in your clothing! — it also means so is the dirt and sweat. If your towels smell sour despite being washed? It’s probably because you washed them in cold water.”
wash everything on the express cycle
On my Maytag washer, this cycle is Rapid Wash. Using a shorter cycle is much kinder to your clothes, which means they will last longer since they aren’t exposed to soap, water, and other clothes for as long. The express wash also saves you time and water.
Select high spin.
Your clothes need to be as dry as possible at the end of the wash cycle to shorten their time spent in the dryer and on drying racks. This has made so much difference on laundry day for me. I use a drying rack and clothesline (in summer) for drying a good deal of our laundry and pretty much only use the dryer for towels, undergarments, socks, etc. Within a couple of hours, our clothes are dry using the high spin.
Add dye-trapping laundry sheet to each wash. I use THESE sheets to help soak up stains, bleeding, and hard-water minerals during the wash cycle. You only need half of these sheets, so rip one in half and toss it in with your wash.
washing really dirty clothing
We usually don’t have really dirty clothes here, but if you have kids in outdoor sports, or spent the day in the garden, or moving dirt, this tip will come in handy. Really dirty clothes can be cleaned well by adding a quarter cup of washing soda, poured right on top of your clothes in the washer, and will boost the detergent’s cleaning power. The washing soda works to soften the wash water and allows the detergent to remove dirt. The soda also keeps the soil in the water instead of re-depositing the dirt on the clothes.
DON’T Use: laundry pods, popular detergents, fabric softeners, dryer sheets chlorine bleach, bleach pens, stain-removing sprays. Patric goes into detail in the book on the reasons not to use these harsh detergents and pods. This one tip has made a huge difference in our laundry and I feel better about what I’m using to wash our clothes.
Skip the bleach for washing clothes: Most hospitals don’t use bleach anymore for cleaning and disinfection. The EPA doesn’t recommend bleach even for black mold removal. Bleach harms the environment, is an irritant on the eyes, nose, skin, and throat. Instead of bleach, use a bleach substitute like OxyClean.
Skip the fabric softener and dryer sheets. The first time you use fabric softener on a load of laundry you are coating your laundry with silicone and cutting the absorbency by up to 80%. When you use dryer sheets and fabric softeners stains become very hard to remove. Patric shares five other legit reasons to pass on these products.
Opt for Soap Flakes or high-quality, plant-based liquid laundry soap free of petroleum, phosphate, phthalates, and parabens to wash your clothes.
Form and Function in the laundry room! I love it when I can have form and function in rooms in our home. Patric recommends using the products that are much prettier in a nice container than those of bright, plastic bottles (that are typically not recyclable).
In my next post, I will include the products recommended by Patric to use for washing clothes. I’ll also include where to purchase the products and how to use them.
If you want to purchase the Laundry Love book, you can find it HERE. It’s an easy and quick read and might just become your go-to laundry room reference book!
