I've been wasting my time reading all sorts of other people's blogs lately, and since I can't think of much else to talk about here lately, I am going to blatantly steal ideas from other people and introduce Boring Wednesday, although since that has no alliterative charm at all, I am going to call it Monotonous Mittwoch (which is wednesday, people!) and talk about something uninteresting (not to be confused with recent posts).
Laundry here is confusing. The only school of laundry thought that I am familiar with is the one where you wash basically everything together in cold water. I am willing to wash some stuff on the gentle cycle, and I am even willing to do a very small amount of hand washing occasionally, but that's about it, frankly. Not here, though. Here the washing machines are covered in all sorts of stupid buttons that do all sorts of unfathomable things (I spent aaages the other day reading the manual for a weird old-fangled washing machine, trying to work out which buttons made it work properly and which were there just to confuse me. Which doesn't sound so arduous, except that the manual was in german/french/italian and frankly, I don't know any foreign words for any laundry-related terms), and Reto has some obsessive compulsive disorder about washing different things at different temperatures and with different types of laundry liquid. Which is all well and good if he wants to do the laundry, but as I am more often than not the only one doing it, I'm not sure I'm willing to play by his rules. I'm not really sure that I see the point.
Does washing stuff in warm water make any difference? As far as I can tell, the only difference is that it kills my socks more quickly. And what's the point of separating different coloured clothes? Is it to protect them from the clothes-ruining effects of washing them in warm water? Because that sounds a lot like making trouble for yourself.
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5 comments:
As someone who has grown up in Europe and then ventured to Ausralia, i could never figure out how people can wash their clothes with cold water only. So, to help you out in your predicament, here's some advice.
Washing with warm water kills any germs you may have on your clothing and ensures that the detergent has desolved and washed away completely. Otherwise you may get that itchy feeling... lol...
So, your towels and underwear would go in on 90 deg C and general t-shirts etc on 60 deg C. Non colour fast stuff would go in on 30-40 deg C and really delicate stuff like silk would never make it inside a washing machine, because its to rough.
There you have it, just saved you time reading the manual. And enough of the washing, bring back the curling !
Wow, that's some serious advice. Far more than I was expecting. And kind of disturbing. Who would have thought you were such a laundry enthusiast, Vlad (not that I am implying that you smell or are dirty or have bits of undissolved laundry powder on your clothes..)?
Probably I should also participate in this discussion. Being Swiss, I have very strong ideas about washing clothes... :-)
I think laundry at 90°C isn't used anymore in Switzerland for energy reasons... I would propose 60°C for underwear and towels. And 40°C for all the other stuff (with exception of the REALLY delicate pieces that you need to do either by hand or at 30°C with a lot of water and minimum revolution speed). Separating the 40°C into ligth and dark colours helps to prevent accidents.
If you use a tuble dryer, don't dry your socks in it. Only sport socks survive - all the others deintegrate after a month or two.
Have fun!!!
Tina
You Europeans are crazy.
Well, separating your washing is worthwhile, because washing black stuff with white stuff means all your white stuff ends up dingy grey.
And washing anything white with anything red and cheap is asking to be put in a psychiatric institution like Homer - except that so many men are wearing pink now. What's with that??
Washing in hot water though is just a waste of energy. Though perhaps it's just that in Australia the water doesn't start off at close to freezing. Warm water doesn't kill germs anyway - it helps them grow. Only really hot water kills them. The best thing for killing germs is just drying everything out properly. Just like when washing your hands.
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