AIBU To Wonder About This Laundry Travesty?

[TheShellBeach]

I am forever reading threads on here about laundry, in which some people admit to putting all their washing in the machine UNSORTED.
Yes! Whites, coloureds, woollens, sheets, towels etc. etc. etc. all put in together.

How can you do this? It's just wrong, isn't it?

(lighthearted)

You know - when the care label gets decided it's after the fabric has been tested? It's not put on there for fun.

It drives me nuts when I get complaints about a shrunk dry clean only garment. It's so obvious it was hand washed or put on 30 degrees. We can tell by measuring the garment you returned. And yes, the returns often do got back to the development team.

A lights wash and a dark wash here. That's the only sorting I do except for my bedding which I do at 90° on it's own.

They get the 15 minute cycle, so any fluff (mats, cloths, mop head) or bleach (cloths only) wash off separately banging around the big drum, then the main whites wash items go in on top. It saves doing a whole separate cycle for just cloths.

My MIL swears by colour catchers our whites are never the same after she's done the washing. Everything has tinges or patches of blue/grey

If I wanted grey clothes I’d buy grey clothes.

There was a test, and colour catchers don’t do a thing.

My dear MIL used to iron socks and pants. I do separate dark from white, and I do iron, but not underwear!

I do whites, pinks and reds together, as I would rather the whites took on a pinkish colour than a grey one, and don't have enough whites for a solo wash. Then darks all together, then medium colours like green. I do have to wait a while to build up a green wash tbh.

I've managed to ruin a lot of clothing through shrinkage / colour runs so take a bit more care these days.

A controlled experiment is happening in my household right now op:

We have too many clothes and I sort them all by colour and fabric and wash at different temperatures and on different settings. Clothes stay bright, and white and emerge from the washer relatively uncreased and the same size and texture. (I need to chuck a lot of them out though!)

My teen daughters on the other hand just throw everything in! They have found that if you wash clothes at 30 degrees and below, the washing stays the same, but if you wash above that temperature, then sometimes the colours run and the occasional item shrinks. And they have learned to wash brand new items separately as they can run too.

I once lent a colleague a pair of a dd’s nice white tights, needed by her own dd for something. We were living abroad where you couldn’t just go and buy such things.

They came back far from pristine - tinged with a dirty bluish grey - so I began to understand why said colleague’s clothes were nearly all a sludgy bluish/greyish colour - she was chucking everything in together.

You're talking to the wrong men

I do whites/lights and darks, and also towels, and occasionally wool (the next time will be when I get home with the cardigan I'm wearing right now at lunch <sigh>.) I wear few synthetics, and I'm careful with washing new stuff until I'm sure it won't run. I don't have a big enough machine to chuck everything in all at once unless I do laundry much more often, and I'm not going to do that unless desperate.

What does wool do to other clothes or vice versa? I usually just wash wool at the end of winter so a few together, but I put other things in with it to make up the load. Wool detergent and cycle.

DH's pastel shirts all go that tired blue-grey because he doesn't believe in separating darks/ lights.

The stuff that I wash for me and the DCs stays much fresher. There's enough of it that separating isn't much work. I just pull off the whites and wash them communally each week.

I wash all of mine together. Life is too short, as others have said. As for being judged for not having brilliant whites - I can honestly say that the type of person to have an opinion on how white my whites are is not someone whose opinion matters to me.

Why can’t towels just go in with everything else? Am I being thick!?

Everything goes in together here except whites!

YANBU, my whites stay white and my clothes/bedding look great after 20 years because everything is sorted into whites/black/pastels/delicates/towels etc.

Towels - and sheets - ideally should be washed at 40 degrees or even 60, whereas most other things are fine at 30.

There's no separation in my household - and I now have "Free Nelson Mandela" playing in my head, so thanks for that OP.

I mean yeah, isn’t it common sense not to wash your towels with your clothes on a low temp?

NHS link

Towels need to be washed at higher temperatures also no fabric conditioner as it makes them greasy and flat.
Ideally a hot wash and a tumble dry to keep them fluffy and absorbent

We just have two washing hampers, one white and one black. Whites/lights go in the white one, everything else in the black. No sorting, just 2 as separate loads when the basket is full

That talks about items being 'high risk' if someone in your home has an infectious illness, not in everyday circumstances.

There are lots of things you can spread this way that can be a mother fucker to get rid of and v annoying

molluscum
thrush
worms
impetigo
scabies
skin Infections generally

for the sake of literally 30 seconds to move towels to one side and do them on their own

we had molluscum and it was really annoying

Towels need to be washed at higher temperatures also no fabric conditioner as it makes them greasy and flat.
I would wash towels at higher temperatures if one of us was ill with a vomiting bug or similar. I don't use fabric conditioner as I don't like my clothes greasy and smelly!