For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
The best transcribed post each week will be pinned and receive a random bitmap of a trophy superimposed with the author's username and a personalized message. Here are some OCR tools to assist you in your endeavors:
FOSS Android Recs per u/[email protected]: 1 , 2
Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
It's worth wondering how much fabric softener would cost someone over their adult lifetime as an exercise. Let's say 50 years of adulthood, and 12 bottles a year costing $10 each. That's six grand. For something that serves no functional purpose, makes towels less effective and has an environmental impact.
So yes it's a scam. If someone really needs to use fabric softener, at least buy a cheaper supermarket brand and use it sparingly.
It's worse. Fabric softener is composed of an anti static oil. When you run it in the laundry, it coats all of your clothes with a very thin layer of oil.
Which is why towels dried with fabric softener and dryer sheets don't absorb water anywhere near as well as plain towels dried without it!!
My mom complained to me for years that I wasn't "doing it right" by not using fabric softener. But her towels are useless compared to mine! She continues to spends $100/ year on fabric softener while on social security. Over the year she has spent thousands and thousands of $$$. ๐คฆโโ๏ธ
Not only that, some people (including myself) are sensitive to the oils used. Having underwear that actively makes you itchy sucks. I switched to wool dryer balls and never looks back
It was the primary cause of milia on my arms/legs. It took me years to figure out why my arms always had things that looked like whiteheads but couldnโt be as there was no infected area around them.
That homemade laundry soap made with bar soap would be a nightmare in hard water. I don't even want to think about soap scum in the drains and in my clothes.
I just use the smallest amount of detergent I can get out of the bottle, that works well. And don't wash a garment after wearing it once if it's not underwear. Invested in a lot of Merino stuff which manages to be comfortable even here in Florida and doesn't stink ever. I can wear those shirts and just hang them back up.
I was with you until the wool in Florida. I lived in FL almost my entire life and there were times I'd have taken off my skin Hellraiser-style just to be less hot
In my opinion the only times I'm ever uncomfortably hot is when I'm choosing voluntarily to be in the sun. For example going to beach.
99% of the time I'm in 67 degree AC in a hoodie lol
67F would have cost me a fortune in FL. For some reason, super tall cathedral ceilings are common in FL homes, making cool costs even higher.
i think it's cause 2 story homes are much less common here compared to up north
i live in a pretty new apartment building and the AC/insulation is very efficient. although to be honest I don't even know what I pay in power, my girlfriend usually pays that one
I'm happy buying detergent honestly - it last a LONG time when you actually use the correct amount per load. I think the real crime is the "measuring caps" on liquid detergent basically tricking everyone into using WAY too much detergent. Most washers will recommend 1-2 tablespoons of detergent maximum for heavily soiled loads.. Most measuring caps are over that even at the first of several marks, and people rarely think they need the minimum (moar soap moar clean, right?) - so people tend to add 5-10 times the detergent they need.
and they we have pods. Which are the hugest ripoff per load, but for the first time people are actually using the right amount of detergent and they're all amazed that the machines don't get gummed up.
Just measure the real stuff right?
The numbers on the cap are just numbers and lines on the cap. You assign meaning to them as the maker never tells you what they are for.
Yeah I buy maybe 2 ยฃ4 bottles of washing liquid a year, because I put in like 1/4 of what it tells me to.
So honestly making my own just isn't worth the time.
The best soap for washing machines is powdered. They remove all the extraneous crap that can also cause mold growth in the washer. Front loaders are really bad about this too.
probably most everything is a scam if you look close enough.
It also makes the clothes extremely flammable.
Honestly at a loss here. The title references fabric softener, but the content relates more specifically to DIY laundry detergent while only mentioning that softener makes clothes more vulnerable to wear & tear. What's the nitty-gritty on the fabric softener? Does it actually damage clothing in some way?
As geek analogy, is it like the subatomic bacteria that starts destroying the Klingon ship in Star Trek: the Next Generation S2E8's "A Matter Of Honor", or does it just make the material more susceptible to tearing?
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/how-do-fabric-softeners-work.html
It was created so that when you dried clothes outside (especially cotton) they didn't get crunchy. The fibers tend to freeze an interlock microscopically when they dry. It coats the fibers and makes them not stick together.
When mechanical dryers became the norm, they needed a new reason, so the called out static. And in some climates, dryer static can be a bit of a pain. Dryer balls supposedly help with this, but I can't find any reasonable data to back that up, and that's just the kind of thing we're confirmation bias over.
Softener can/will build up on the fabric. It can discolor bright whites.
I think the worst of it is:
Dryer balls supposedly help with this
From what I've heard, dryer balls help the drying process by warming up faster than the wet clothes and drying from inside the pile. And even if that turns out to have been misinformation, I'm not too annoyed by it because it's a single low-cost expense whereas dryer sheets are consumables
So I live in a super dry climate. I've gotten static shocks that leave my hand numb (not from the laundry, taking off layers while wearing rubber boots) because it's just that dry here.
Dryer balls don't work for static in my experience. Put a couple pins in it? That didn't work. Dryer sheets are pretty much the only thing that actually cuts it as far as I can tell.
Yup, I saw a reasonably well-conducted study that verified they decrease dryer time.
Just the sort of information that I was after, thank you.
I worked in appliances for about ten years, and not a single washer manufacturer would actually recommend using fabric softener. It horribly gums up the workings of the machine, even when you use the tiny amount you are actually supposed to (which most people use way too much). They are (or were originally) basically just animal fats and emulsifiers with some fragrance thrown in. They smell awful when they are left stuck somewhere for a long time (like the outer walls of the inner tub of your washing machine - seriously, it probably looks furry if you opened it up to see).
I can't speak to what it does to your clothes specifically, but I can imagine several downsides to essentially coating fabric in lavender scented industrial mayonnaise.
Interesting take, it's the first that I'm hearing about them gumming up the machine's innards, but I can definitely see that being a serious issue over time.
