Laundry 101 With Kismai

r/Laundry is filled with tales of woe - smelly armpits, mystery stains, socks the color of cream of mushroom soup - complete with mysterious embedded dark chunks.  I personally love solving these problems (and the reactions when people post the process and results of disaster recovery are extremely popular there).

But what of people who just have normal laundry and want a little tune-up?  Or have never done their own laundry before?  How about some love and guidance for the non-smelly, non-stained, non-crusty? Here's something for them. How I do normal laundry day-to-day.

Getting Personal:

What people are often surprised to learn is that I really don’t enjoy doing laundry.   I don’t think it’s an act of service - I think it’s survival, and I further think expending the minimal amount of time and effort that respects my textiles (and the human and resource inputs that went in to making them) is the best use of my time.  It just needs to be done right the first time, every time, so I can watch cat videos on the Internet.

There’s no one right way to do laundry, just like there’s no one right way to make a grilled cheese sandwich.  Much like slightly-stale sourdough with a skim of dijon mustard inside and a blend of sharp cheddar and either fontina or Monterey Jack, fried in Whirl  is my favorite way to do the latter, this is my laundry default method, developed over the years of contending with my messes.  95%+ of the loads I do fall in this rubric.    Also note that I’m in North America with water softer than about 75% of households.

There are endless corner cases, including silk, wool, down, GoreTex and other waterproof technical fabrics, semi-synthetics like rayon, viscose, “bamboo”, modal, Lyocell and Tencel, silver-infused, FR and anti-static, pillows and stuffed toys, shoes and rugs.  I’ll get to those later.   This is for:

• Towels

• Sheets / Duvet Covers / Pillowcases

• Clothing (other than Dry Clean Only pieces) 

Which are at least 95% the following fibers:

• Cotton

• Linen

• Hemp

• Ramie

• Polyester / Dacron 

• Nylon / Polyamide

• Acrylic

• Lycra / Spandex / Elastane

Laundry Apartheid:  Separating The Whites And The Colors

Please note:  I have a problem.  I don’t think you absolutely need to do this much to have very good results.  You could easily combine the dark and lights in a color family, for example, especially if you use a detergent with anti-redeposition or use color catchers.     It’s also likely you could combine neutrals and embellished whites successfully.  

I have a lot of laundry categories.   I also don’t look good in yellow or orange, so I don’t own it.  If you do, good for you, and you could aim at the red loads and move the purples to the dark blues and greens.  I wear a lot of plum and purple.    I have a bunch of IKEA Frakta/Storstomma 80 liter bags hanging up, and stuff gets sorted into them daily.  When they’re mostly full, I run the load.

• Black, charcoal, navy and dark brown

• Dark blues and greens

• Dark reds and purples

• Light blues and greens

• Light reds and purples

• Neutrals like khaki, tan, ecru, light grey and taupe

• Whites with stripes / embellishment

• Absolute plain white

• Socks & Underwear (cotton blends, mostly white)

• Sheets (by color)

• People Towels (by color)

• Kitchen & Pet Towels (all white, presoaked with chlorine bleach for sanitizing in my world)

The towels and sheets get isolated in this scheme because for me, I need to dry the sheets on Delicate and the towels on High.  Your sheets may be more durable or you may be willing to separate them between the wash and dry.   They’re both full loads for me, without the need to combine to make a good load.

Sorting like this gives me flexibility in the choice of chemistry, and doesn’t require me to take any special precautions to prevent color transfer in anything but the first wash of an item.   I also care a lot less about lint, because the lint is largely invisible when it’s between items of like color and intensity.

Pretreat:  Don’t Make Your Detergent Do Everything

I am a pretreater.  One of the first laundry tasks I was ever trusted with by my legendarily persnickety mother was identifying stains for pretreating, and eventually I was trusted with her can of old-skool Spray ’n’ Wash with solvents.  Detergents and equipment have improved a lot in the years since mumblemumble, but I still pretreat, in exchange for not having to check every garment for lingering stains between wash and dry.   

The Usual:  Stains from Food, Plants and Animals Including Myself

This is the most common cause of stains on my laundry.   It’s like I never learned to use cutlery as a toddler.    It’s also the most common cause of spots on most textiles for most people.

My not-so-secret weapon against these stains?  Enzyme pretreater.  They’re safe on the listed fabrics regardless of color, they’re not smelly or environmentally sketchy, they work extremely well and there are many to choose from.  There’s a list on the spreadsheet linked at The Lipase List on the Pretreater tab.   Pick whichever one sounds good - they all work about the same because their formulae are about the same. I've got a stockpile of old-formula Tide Rescue that I'm emotionally attached to in a less-than-healthy way, but I've also been happy with Whole Foods and Open Nature. I'll pick up a bottle of the President's Choice next time I'm in Canada.

Spritz or squirt the stains at least a half-hour before laundering, up to about a week.  These removers are working so long as they’re damp, and once they’ve worked, the stain washes out with detergent - so don’t be discouraged if the stain still appears to be there before washing.  

The Not Uncommon: Mineral Oils

I work on cars and do motorsports.  I get automotive grease on me.   Enzyme pretreaters are nothing special on this kind of oily soil.  What works is nonionic surfactant, the active ingredient in many heavy-duty liquid detergents.  Anything can work here.   I usually have some Tide or Persil around for this purpose.  If you get these spots, hit them with some liquid detergent at least fifteen minutes before washing.   Penetration is improved if you dilute 1:1 with tap water.  Tamping the mixture in with a brush or spoon can help improve first-wash removal. This is also a solid pretreater for waterproof/water resistant makeup stains.

The Woes Of Living With Someone Who Takes Notes In Ink

Ink merits special consideration.   While many inks and markers and crayons will come out with standard wash, many will not.  If I see an ink mark on something, I pretreat it with a specialist product, either Amodex or Carbona Stain Devil 3, Ink, Marker & Crayon, following the label directions carefully.  

These three categories cover 99% of my laundry woes.  Ask r/laundry or DM me for advice if you have something else on your textiles.  Don’t dump v1negar on it as a default. 

Check. Your.  Pockets. 

I argue that it’s the responsibility of whoever wore the garment to check the pockets before things go in the hamper, barring some debility or being too young to understand the risks of not doing so (which in my case could rise to capital punishment).  But it behooves the launderer to give a final check.  The launderer is entitled to keep anything they find that they want, including cash, jewelry, electronics and snacks.  Consider it a tip. 

Load The Machine: 

I have a 4.5 ft^3 LG front loader.   Truly middle of the pack.   If I’m using powders in the wash cycle, they go in the back of the drum now.   We’ll come back to that topic. 

I add enough textiles to reach at least 75% of the way up the opening but not so many there isn’t a fist worth of space open at the top of the drum.   Loading this full optimizes the mechanical action of the wash.  I check the door seal drains for lint or hair or debris before shutting the door. 

If something has straps narrower than about 2” or is of delicate construction that could be prone to stretching (a sweater like a knit cotton cardigan, not a sweatshirt), it goes in a mesh delicates bag, alone.   If it has screen printed graphics or is denim, it gets turned inside out to protect the surface appearance.  If you want your jeans to exhibit more character at friction points, wash right side out.   Zippers are zipped. Buttons and snaps are unfastened.  Velcro is adjusted so no scratchy part is exposed.  Hoodie strings are tied.  

When I still use a conventional top loader, like on vacation,I loosely load it dry to the water fill line that you can usually see on the agitator.   I would then adjust the water fill level so, after a couple minutes of agitation, the textiles have between 3/4  and two inches of water above them.  1.5 is perfect.

Chemistry:  

I’m a sweaty greasy mess who drops food.  So obviously I use an enzyme detergent.   I maintain a list at The Lipase List where you can find something you like that works with your water.   I don’t care about the presence or absence of fragrance one way or the other, but if the product is fragranced it has to be unobtrusive.  From an olfactory perspective, I really don’t want $5 of my perfume overpowered by $0.02 worth of laundry fragrance.   

As of this writing, I’m doing 85+% of my loads with 2 oz/60ml of liquid 365 Sport Detergent  from Whole Foods because it has an uncommon enzyme, DNase, that gets my clothes cleaner than my previous regimen.  I’ve discussed why DNase matters elsewhere.   I add 1-2 fluid oz (2-4T / about 20-40g)  or so of an oxygen bleach. If a load is cotton-rich and lighter in color than “light navy”,  it’s more likely to get Biz just because I like the effect of optical brightener.   If the load is darker, it doesn’t get Biz - it gets an oxi without optical brightener, like Kirkland Signature (which I hate the smell of and am working through to use it up), Target’s Up and Up, OxiClean Free or 365 Oxygen Whitener.  When I get to the bottom of this pile of oxi bleaches, I’ll switch to Febu to get all the goodies aside from optical brightener.

The other 15% of these animal-fiber-free loads get Tide with Bleach powder.  It’s purely vibes and color that define which gets which when.  Only things qualifying as lights or lighter get the TwB.   I also use TwB on kitchen towels because they don’t get a lot of benefit from DNase - might as well save a little cash.

Automotive loads get Tide/Persil liquid and a cup of ammonia.  You can’t beat the cleaning of a high-performance conventional-surfactant liquid on petrochemical soils.  Ammonia helps the grease removal.  

I am a massive fan of citric acid rinsing.  It leaves my cottons cottonier, my polyesters slicker and my animal fibers softer and smoother.    I use a shade over 2 tsp / 10g citric acid crystals right in the softener dispenser.  My machine likes the dry just fine and I don’t get residual crunchies after the wash.  YMMV.   Details of the Why of citric rinsing here

Wash (Finally):

TL;DR - warm water, Normal cycle,  extra rinses, adjusting soil level as appropriate with just enough detergent to do the job, citric acid in the rinse.

Wash Action: 

I generally wash on Normal because these items are Normal.    I usually set the soil level to the maximum - this extends the agitation to get maximum cleaning with no downside except a time penalty.  

Temperature: 

I usually select a warm wash for clothing and a hot wash for socks/underwear, towels and sheets.  The exception to this is clothing with automotive soils - it gets much cleaner on hot wash because of the nature of the soils.  My warm wash is about 102F/39C.  Barely over body temperature, slightly cooler than I like my bathwater or shower, completely appropriate for bathing an infant.  Using water of this temperature lets me use half the agitation time as I would at 82F/28C to get the same cleaning results, and one fourth the agitation time as would be required at 62F/17C.   Rinses are always cold on my machine.

Rinse: 

Yes, please.  All of them.  As many as the machine will let me select.   Even with perfectly dosed detergent, you’re going to get some carryover from wash to rinse, and at the end of the first rinse, my clothes are still of higher pH than my tap water.  That’s a definitive indication that there is still wash chemistry in there.    pH is easy to measure on finished fabrics (just touch pH paper to the damp textiles and see for yourself) and it’s therefore the best proxy for rinse thoroughness.  Three gallons of extra water for each rinse cycle is pocket lint compared to the other ways we use water in the US, and it’s respectful to your skin and the textiles to get them throughly rinsed.   My machine dispenses the softener cup in the last selected rinse, so my final pH is lower than tap water thanks to the citric acid.

Spin Speed: 

Send it.  Unless an item is stuffed or of extremely delicate construction (like a $500 bra), spin speed is a synonym for “how much detergent-infused water would you like to get rid of?”  I’d like to maximize that.  High speed spin it is.

I then go off and ignore the machine for 2:07.  It’s laboring.  I don’t need to.  I come here and talk about laundry.

How (Not) Dry I Am:

For as much time as I want my clothes to spend in the washer, and my longstanding enthusiasm for warmer wash temperatures, my feelings about the dryer go the other way.

The dryer is where clothes (especially natural and semisynthetic fibers) go to die.  Hot dry air is lethal to clothing.  Overdrying is so much worse than any notional “overwashing”.

Unless it’s a towel, if it’s going in the dryer, it’s going on Delicate, Sensor Dry, set to “less dry”, and all the “wrinkle guard”/cool down my 1987 Kenmore can muster.     This leaves most cotton-rich fabrics barely damp to the touch, slightly damper at the seams.   At the end of the cycle, they are room temperature and that trace of dampness ensures they never got too hot during the cycle to come up to “damaged fiber”.  As a result, my lint screen has barely the faintest trace of lint from clothing loads (although, admittedly, we don’t wear a ton of fleece).    Shirts and pants get hung out of the dryer, other clothing gets piled loosely in an open basket to acclimate / finish drying at ambient.  

Sheets get dried all the way to dry on delicate (a tiny fraction closer to the “dry” setting than the “less dry” and sometimes they need an hour laid out on the bed before they’re completely dry.

Towels get dried sensor dry hot as a final microbial kill step and come out hot to the touch.

If the item is more than about 75% synthetic content, it’s getting hung to dry right out of the washer.   My laundry room is warm and dry and these fibers dry so quickly.  Limiting exposure to heat is especially important for blends with Lycra/spandex/elastane.   It’s like the fountain of youth for elastics to avoid dry heat.

That’s it.  That’s how I do laundry.

Products mentioned here are mentioned because I like them;  I haven’t been paid to mention any of them.  Trademarks are those of the trademark holders.  The work is my original work and I retain copyiright.  My financial disclosure information and how I get paid for this work can be found here.