![]() “Laundry stripping in a bathtub is effective, but it is inconvenient, time consuming, and messy,” Handel says. You can easily use your washing machine’s customized settings to get better results. There’s a more efficient way, Handel says. Transfer the wet clothes to dry, and wipe out the tub to prevent dye stains. But you’ll be left with cleaner clothes-and extensive cleanup duty. It’s potentially caustic, and Handel recommends wearing gloves and a mask to avoid touching and inhaling dispersed dust particles.Īfter you remove the laundry, leftover water might be murky gray, black, or the color of the fabric. The high-pH washing soda (a sodium carbonate commonly known as soda ash), works as a cleaner and water softener. Laundry strippers typically soak their laundry for hours in a mix of hot water, Borax, washing soda, and detergent until gunk and grime slowly separate from fabric. But it also can remove dye and damage certain fabrics vulnerable to heat and high pH.” “The process can help soak away leftover residue. “We’re not exactly sure how it started, but laundry stripping may have grown out of the need to clean large items, like carpets and comforters, that wouldn’t fit into the washing machine,” says a CR test engineer, Richard Handel, who oversees our laundry lab. ½ cup washing powder or 2 cups washing liquidįill the bath or tub with the hottest water out of the tap, enough to cover the items completely.Īdd the item or items, stir and soak until the water goes cold - stirring every hour.Laundry stripping is the process of soaking one’s washables in a bathtub to extract built-up soil, detergent, and fabric softener from clothes, bedding, or anything you launder. ![]() I was shocked at how much of a difference it made on both loads of washing and it's something I will be doing again. Seeing the results from both the clothes and the blanket has made me want to strip wash literally everything I can now. As for the clothes, they came out of the wash feeling a lot fresher with the same really clean smell. It took around a day for the blanket to dry completely but it feels soft and smells amazingly clean now. The blanket after a few hours had turned the water a murky brown but the water at the end was disgusting. The clothes in the laundry tub were a lot easier to deal with, it was only a couple of hours until the water cooled down enough to put it all in the machine for a regular wash. The blanket is around king size and with the weight of the water it had soaked up there was no chance it was going in the machine, so I handwashed it in the bath - with a lot of help from my boyfriend, who also helped actually get it on the clothes line. In the end the water was absolutely disgusting and almost black after that much dirt and filth had come out. It took around five hours for the water in the bath to cool down enough to try and wash the blanket as normal, but there was a problem: it wasn't going to fit in the washing machine. The results from a general load of clothes in a strip wash were surprising but not shocking. Meanwhile in the laundry tub my clothes were also soaking in the mix and the water had started to go a cloudy colour, but nowhere near the colour of the blanket water. It was shocking to see just how quickly the filth was seeping out of the blanket. It was obvious the mix was already working its magic and with each stir the colour got worse. Within seconds of putting the blanket into the bath the water started to go brown. I decided to do the blanket in the bath and the load of clothes in the laundry sink. ![]() It didn't take long at all for the dirt and grime to start seeping out of the blanket.
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