What are these marks on my white washing?

[Darkdarknightinthedarkdarkstaircase]

Wow, I really have hit 40 hard

These marks on my white washing drive me crazy. Loads of our white clothes are stained with them, particularly the children's tops.

Any ideas? And how to get them out?

Also, any ideas about how to attach a photo?!

No photo's yet, what colour / size are the marks?

Photos finally attached

I don’t know but this happens to mine too sometimes.

My dd is notorious for this on all her clothes, it looks like grease but never figured out from what. Tried rubbing fairy liquid onto them and washing again?

Could it be bubble mixture? That leaves weird grey stains on everything!

Do you use fabric softener? I used to be really heavy handed with it until my niece told me that you can over condition, I don’t use it at all anymore and rarely get spots like these on clothes now unless we’ve spilt greasy food!

Just figured it out now..... the cause of mine will be slime!!!!

Slime is a definite possibility 😬

In my house, it’s because the washing machine needs a deep clean. It’s excess soap / grime from the machine - the equivalent of a blocked sink. I use soda crystals and a hot wash and it all dissolves.

Oh thanks for this, I might do this at the weekend - think mine could do with a clean of some kind as it has had a bit of weird smell since Christmas!

This sounds very possible too, as these marks also appear on adult's tops!
How and where do you put the soda crystals?

These seem to appear on my kids’ white school polo shirts! No idea what they are, but they do not shift.

In the drum of the machine, and then a super hot wash. You can buy washing machine cleaner too.

Machine clean, check and clean filter, run a regular hot wash and think about the efficiency of detergents, adding soda crystals to detergents, whether fabric conditioner is needed. First, the filter check.

This has happened to me before too on hoodies etc and turned out to be fabric conditioner. A dob of fairy washing up liquid and it comes out next wash (it’s just a grease mark). I stopped using separate fabric conditioner and haven’t had the problem since.

Buy a bottle of washing machine cleaner and run it through the machine. I use to have to do that regularly to keep it clean when I used the small plastic liquid washing tabs. Since switching to old fashioned washing powder it doesn't seem to happen any more.

I had this recently and took a lot of the advice suggested already. An eye opener was the filter - that was thick with a soggy grey lint type gunk (possibly a tissue?) but since I did a thorough clean the problem has gone fortunately.

For those who use soda crystals in the drum - how much do you use and is there a specific brand?

A washing machine engineer I know said just buy cheap bio washing powder, put it in the drawer and then run an empty drum on the hottest setting the machine has. He said to do it once a month for a really clean machine but a minimum of quarterly. If you normally use capsules or liquids they are notorious for leaving grey sludge in the machine, especially if you mostly run 30° or lower washes.

My machine has a way of telling me it needs cleaning - the timer stops on 1 minute and doesn't reset to 0 until it's been cleaned. You can still use the machine but it's a very handy reminder to run the hot wash.