To not separate my colours

[tipitall]

There must be a way to wash everything together and not have white shirts and t shirts turn grey. Any tips?

It isn’t just washing, it’s tumble drying. The fibres of coloured clothes shed into white items. Like a PP I separate whites, lights, brights and darks. I don’t do a separate blacks wash although now I’m thinking I should!

I always used to separate whites and colours because that's the way my mum taught me to do laundry. I do remember when new coloured clothes used to leak colour for the first few washes.

When I started going on longer holidays as an adult and needing to take clothes to laundries (backpacking for a month in the summer, no way I was going to carry a month's worth of clothes), I realised that clothes weren't being separated and were fine.

I haven't separated whites and colours for years and my (few) whites still look white. Now that dd has grown up and I don't have school shirts to wash, it would take weeks and weeks to have enough whites to make up a load.

We've been doing my adult daughter's washing for the past couple of weeks (family of 4) while she is waiting to get a new machine plumber in. I can really tell that she doesn't separate out her whites!

Greyish or beigish 'white' shirts, socks and t-shirts. I have separated them out and washed them on their own with a whitener powder, some things I have washed twice, and although they are a bit brighter they still aren't white.

if you want to keep things white you really need to wash them separately. If you're not going to do that use a colour catcher sheet, or two, and try not to put your whites with things that are likely to bleed dye.

Washing isn’t too expensive. It’s the tumble dry that’s the killer.

Either use a colour catcher to try and protect your whites, or use laundry products for white clothes and accept that your colours will fade.

I don’t separate and just use colour catcher sheets.
I do wash anything that I suspect might have dye run on its own for a bit eg some
jeans and DD had a red Xmas outfit that saturated a colour catcher sheet that was banished from the main washing.

But I don’t own much white deliberately.

My washing gets seperated into four loads

Bedding
Towels
Whites/creams
Everything else

Cloths and tea towels get put in a little bucket once they are used and washed with either the bedding and towels as they are done at 60 or 90 so I'm not worried about cross contamination! I was both whited and everything else with a colour catcher.