Episode 2: What We Learned

To run this experiment we did a lot of laundry, and along the way learned some things (some of it the hard way).

Here’s is some of what we learned:

• Even our relatively cheap new front-loading washing machine is considered “high efficiency” and requires the use of high efficiency soap. Something that we learned many, many suds later.
• Contributing to our sudsy problem was the fact that pretreating our stains left quite a bit of soap on our samples. Lesson learned: if you have a lot of pretreated items in your laundry, you can probably back off on the detergent a bit.
• Speaking of detergent, it turns out that laundry “soap” and laundry “detergent” are not the same thing. It’s an important distinction because some stains (like our wine stains) can get permanently set if you use soap instead of detergent.
• Most stains can be pretreated in some way with just detergent and water. Sometimes it’s a matter of letting the stained item soak in a solution of water and detergent. Other times you give the item a rinse and then let detergent sit on the stain for a while.
• The temperature of the “cold” water that comes out of your wall can vary quite a bit, from over 70 degrees in the summer, to under 40 degrees in the winter.
• For most washing machines “cold” means taking 100% of the wash water from the cold water supply line (makes sense, right?). “Hot” means taking 100% from the hot supply line. “Warm” takes about 50% from each (this varies a bit depending on the specific washer model).
• Our washing machine actually detected when the “cold” temperature was below its minimum threshold (when we were using very cold water), and shut off. Fortunately we found a way around that ;)
• The combination of oil, wine, (grape) instant drink mix, and chocolate pudding didn’t taste all that bad, actually. Just kidding!
• We used corn oil for our fat/oil stain because we thought that its yellow color would make the stain easy to see. Turns out, not so much.
• The fun of watching your experiment in action in a washing machine wears off after a while (though the fun of getting results never does).