Washing Machine & Washer Dryer -
Whiter Whites, Brighter Colours
All about detergents and additives...
The finer points and tips on soap powders, or detergents as they should be called and why we should all care about them and their use.
Yeah, yeah, I know we hear it all the time on TV in some thirty second adverts that one detergent is better than another and it’s a battle slugged out for hearts and minds by the major brands that we all know so well.
But what they can’t do in thirty seconds is tell you what you actually need to know.
You see most people couldn’t give a fig about detergents or washers, instead what happens is that you fire the clothes in the washing machine and just assume that the washer will just clean your clothes. Well, in real life, things don’t just happen like that. For years I’ve told customers that the detergent that you use is as important as the machine you use or choose to buy as the two to work in harmony with one another and each forms an important part in the results that you will get.
And we hear all the time that killer phrase, “I’ve been washing this way for years…” but the thing is, technology changes and moves on. Washing machines have advanced, detergents have advanced and the materials used for clothing have advanced but people’s attitude and methods often have not. With so called “designer clothing” now being so popular the last thing that anyone wants to do is to only get a few uses from any one article of clothing, you want to get the best from it for as long as possible to get value for money. Apart from which there is the real environmental concern about throwing away clothing prematurely or indeed washing articles more than once to get them clean.
That’s only the start of it though. People are massively confused by all the products out there, just as with the machines that you use and, just like the machines, there’s little guidance on offer to you. So if you want to be ahead of the pack and a bit more in-the-know about it all this article is designed to give you the knowledge you need to know better and save money.
Now that you know that much you have a simple choice to make, you can read all about the chemistry and other bits and bobs that explain why I think all this is important, which to many people will most likely be really boring unless you happen to be interested. Or, you can just read the quick tips here to get decent results, it’s your call.
Top tips for results are as follows:
Sort your laundry
Make sure you separate whites from colours. Seriously, you’d be amazed at the number of people that don’t bother doing this and it really is crucial. I mean, think about it, if you wash a white Calvin Klein shirt with pink socks things really ain’t gonna go well for the shirt.
Colour And Normal Detergent
The reason you have colour detergent is that there is no bleach in it, okay there’s more that that to it but it’s as much as we normal people need to know as this stops the colour getting bleached out of your clothes. After one or two washes you won’t notice the difference, but trust me, after as little as ten washes you will.
Thankfully after receiving this little nugget of information my dark shirts, including a nice Timberland one I love, are safe from becoming bleached out.
Dose Correctly
Hot topic this one. But basically most people, for most everyday clothing will need to wash them as being “medium soiled”.
Light soiled means a garment lightly worn not next to the skin.
Medium soiled is something that has been worn next to the skin, in other words, most things.
Heavy soil is something that is really mucky or has been worn under physical duress and will be full of sweat etc., like sportswear, tea towels and the likes.
This also affects the likes of the "quick wash" programs as they are not geared to clean anything other than lightly soiled clothing, a kind of refresher program. So your clothes may not be as clean as you would like, or think that they are in reality.
As people are fed up with long program times manufacturers are starting to play on this and offering, in my opinion, stupidly fast "quick washes", one is now offering a machine with a fifteen minute cycle. I simply fail to see how this can get clothing clean and, like most other claims made by washing machine manufacturers there seems to be little, if any, evidence to support the claims.
Don’t Overload!
The deal here is that if you overload then the clothes can’t move properly in the drum, so the detergent doesn’t get to the clothes and so you get a whole host of problems, the major one being that clothes aren’t washed properly, which isn’t good. Apart from not getting your clothes clean you can also do some serious harm to the machine itself, again, not good.
Try to leave 10cm or about a hand-width between the top of the clothes and the top of the drum otherwise it’s not going to work properly and you’ll get poorer results and very possibly wreck your machine or stop it doing stuff it should.
Maintenance Wash
Once a month, please, please run the machine through a boil wash with a full dose of powder or tablet detergent to clean it out.
Use detergent because it kills germs if you use a biological (which I’d recommend for normal use anyway for whites) and the “builders” in the detergent will remove limescale. This is a lot cheaper than using some ad-on products such as Calgon.
Fabric Care Labels
Follow them!
They stop stuff ending up “Action Man” size, stops the fabrics getting prematurely worn, stops colour bleed and a whole host of other nasty stuff that can make your clothes just horrid or looking “done” after only a few washes. So please take the time to read the labels and use the appropriate cycle on your washing machine to accommodate them.
If you follow all the above then you’re off to a good start. I know it seems a lot, but modern machines and clothes are fickle things (especially the clothes) and if you make a mistake it can cost you dearly. With the popularity of designer wear and non-traditional fabric mixes this is vital if you want that £60 or more shirt look good beyond the first few times that you wear it.
This also means that you have to choose the correct cycle or program to correspond on your machine by following the care labels.
The simple tips above are enough to make sure you don’t have any major disasters and, if you’re really interested or just curious there’s a whole load more that I can tell you about this subject which is actually pretty fascinating and it explains a lot of the above.
If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations I’ve obviously not bored you death with all this quite yet, so I’ll continue.
One of the single biggest problems with detergents is the bewildering array of them on the shelves which makes it so very easy to get confused. Many people don’t even know what they are buying and, because there’s little or no information out there, you are simply left to guess at what’s best for you.
I’ll try to explain it and help you make a more informed choice.
Bio vs Non-Bio
The difference is simple, bio has enzymes in it and non-bio does not. The enzymes are “biological” in that they target certain types of organic based stains and remove them extremely effectively. They occur naturally and pose no threat to humans.
There’s an argument that you get which says that non-bio is better for your skin, well, maybe in about 0.0002% of people or some other such insignificant odds. You’ve more chance of winning the lottery than suffering some form of skin problem due to a modern name-brand detergent as the science and testing that goes into these products is just absolutely staggering.
Quite honestly after studying detergents this seems nothing more than a myth and an easy way out for the medical profession who should really do a proper skin test if you suffer from irritation to find out what the actual problem is instead of just guessing.
Funnily enough I was recently informed that the UK was the only country in the world where there was bio and non-bio available. Amazing how the rest of the world doesn’t suffer the same alleged skin irritations isn’t it?
Powder, tablets, liquid…
Confusing isn’t it? So many different formats and hardly a single scrap of information on the supermarket’s shelves to tell you what’s what, the big problem is that the detergent manufacturers also seem a tad reluctant to tell you as well. And, of course, competition is so fierce most are keener to sell you something that to explain it to you.
Well above are the three basic formats which I will explain briefly without getting at all technical.
Powder is the original detergent format and to this day it has all the technologies available in it, you get the full cadre of cleaning power in a powder so after that it only comes down to how good it is. I know it’s potentially messy and harder to get home but it really is the best.
Tablets are different as most are hard pressed by a stamp, it’s basically just powder though that is highly compressed. The big problem is that some take quite a while to dissolve and therefore you can’t use them in the soap drawer, except Ariel tablets. You will also need a net or bag for any bar Ariel tablets as otherwise, since they don’t dissolve so fast, they can sit on clothes and the bleach makes short work of any coloured items. So tablets are good in some ways, poor in others.
Liquid is the most convenient in many ways to a lot of people as you just pick up a bottle and pour it in. well, that’s the theory at least.
In practice liquid can cause a lot of trouble, especially for service engineers. You see, it’s easily overdosed and this can cause no end of harm to a machine and that goes back to the tip about dosing on the first page, it really is vital to get it right or expect a bill for the engineer as manufacturers generally do not cover for detergent misuse which is the way they view these problems.
If the dosage doesn’t get you then the smell might, liquid detergents do not and cannot at this time contain a bleaching agent (nor is it ever likely to) so the bacteria doesn’t always get killed in the machine. This can congeal and for a rather smelly mass which is not good for your nose or your machine and that’s one of the reasons why I recommend a maintenance wash and why it has to be done with powder or tablets, so that there’s a bleaching agent to remove any bacterial build up in the machine.
Additives
For the past few months at the time of writing I’ve seen many, many adverts on TV for what we refer to as additives, things like Vanish and Calgon. Well, if you use a quality detergent and use it correctly then there is absolutely no need for these products.
I would argue that they are marketed to solve a problem not created by stains or whatever, but to compensate for people’s lack of knowledge about the subject and how to use both their detergent and washing machine together properly. And the companies that sell such products do very nicely out it.
For example look at Vanish. If you actually look at what’s in the tub on the ingredients label the two that stand out for me are bleaching agents and enzymes, basically it’s a big tub of bleach with a few other goodies thrown in, but it sells at a massive premium for such a small amount over even a premium detergent.
But, if you think about it a bit, if you put Vanish into a coloured wash then you just added bleach and a lot of it. You wouldn’t put bleach in with your best blue shirt would you? Some people do unwittingly because this isn’t explained in the marketing for such products, only that they magically somehow remove stains, but there’s no magic at all, just chemistry.
And of course there’s the enzymes. This one really makes me cringe when you open a customer’s cupboard only to find non-bio detergent sat beside a tub of Vanish or similar as they have, totally unwittingly, added exactly what they wished to avoid without realising it, again only because it isn’t explained and it’s not the person’s fault really. It’s also kind of weird that no doctor has ever, that I’ve heard of, asked if the person suffering from some skin irritation uses any additives in their wash, they only suggest the detergent. Funny that, isn’t it?
Of course with all this new found knowledge you won’t make that mistake, or at least I hope you won’t and that you’ll get better results without spending more money than you have to.
Recommended
Yes we recommend the use of Ariel products and we’re very open about it. We do this simply as they are the best product for the job and we’ve proved it both in the lab and in the field and it really is that simple.
We proved in an independently monitored test over several days that Ariel was far superior in terms of stain removal and, in field tests with normal day-to-day use that the products are also superior to other brands.
Couple this better performance with the knowledge to get the best from both the washing machine and the detergents used and the results are often staggering to people. Many didn’t think that such performance was possible and all it took was a little bit of information on how to use and, not to use, the products that they already had.
More Information
You can find our top pick of the best cleaning products in this downloadable PDF brochure
You can find more, as well as related, information on the effects of not carrying out a maintenance wash from the following articles:
Smelly Washing Machines how to avoid nasty smells and get rid of them
Washing Machine Soap Drawers how to clean them to avoid smells and bacteria build ups
Door Seal Mildew or Black Marks how to cure it and what causes it
Washing Machine Maintenance Wash what it is and why it is important
Click here to send a spares enquiry
Or call us on our direct spares hotline: 0845 172 8002 (lo call)
For an engineer please click here
Find spares in our online store
 Cookers & Ovens |  Washing Machine |  Tumble Dryer |
 Fridges & Freezers |  Dishwasher Spares |  Cooker Hoods |
 Floorcare |  Fridge Water Filters |  Cleaning Products |
Posts
