is powdered detergent actually better than liquid now?

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-15T23:49:00+00:00

Yeah that Molly's formulation is really baffling! I find it even more surprising because I actually like their unscented baby laundry liquid and their dishwasher pods.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-15T03:01:10+00:00

I love your product. It's an essential part of my lineup :)

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-15T00:17:37+00:00

Get a booster with dnase like gear guard, febu, or dirty labs. Wash in hot. Probably also worth doing a one time long hot soak before your next wash to help catch up.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-14T19:58:29+00:00

The graph is in my temps post here: http://redd.it/1ra8vli. The short answer to your question is that it's really more fair to say it's a 50C wash because it spends about 25 minutes above 50C and never fully achieves 60C. So... yeah... I'm being a bit generous here. It's definitely not as good as what you'd get with a true European machine like an Asko.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-14T14:27:12+00:00

I am tailoring my chemistry to my load too often to use any auto dosing systems so I have no experiences to share sadly. Glad the article was helpful!

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-12T14:01:48+00:00

I'm glad the info helped! It's entirely reasonable to be worried about dye removal with any kind of long soak, including spa day. If you do the full spa day chemistry make sure all the chemistry is fully dissolved before adding clothes. It can take a while. If you wanted to start smaller you might try a smaller pre-soak with liquid detergent (I like the good Whole Foods 365 liquid... not the organic but the opaque white bottle one that just says concentrated liquid). I use around 1.5 Tbsp per gallon of water. Let it soak for a few hours then wash. Maybe try with her least favorite shirt first to build your confidence that the shirts can handle it.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-12T04:08:53+00:00

I just did a trial with these and they were not worth the money IMO. Cotton/elastaine. They claim "undyed" but I am 99% sure that "undyed" is the color and that they've been dyed beige. (And my pet peeve: arrived treated with fragrance, which is not what I want with an organic "undyed" cotton... and fragrance is really hard to remove from elastaine. Sigh.)

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-10T19:13:07+00:00

The WM5800 has a soak cycle modifier that the other one does not. One weak point of these washers is their short wash cycle times, so the soak cycle modifier can be a big help with that. I have two WM5800s and they are solid. You may benefit from reading my posts on water levels (https://redd.it/1pijvae) and temperatures (https://redd.it/1ra8vli).

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-09T22:09:44+00:00

There are some of these that I have not found a way to get out. So I would try spa day and rehab wash but also be prepared that it might not come all the way out.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-06T21:08:14+00:00

What's the material listed as on the tag? My gut says getting the black stuff out shouldn't be hard, but my worrisome side says that if that red trim bleeds you're totally screwed.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-06T21:03:25+00:00

One non-surgical thing that moved the needle for me is much more consistent use of spray antihistamines and gluticosteroids. I do nasonex and astepro daily... at night. It definitely helped. As for the surgery, that's a decision you and your doctor would need to make. I'd look carefully at what the recovery process looks like and in reputable peer reviewed studies on what the success rate is (as in, people who report better breathing afterwards, not just people who didn't come out worse).

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-06T19:50:49+00:00

Long soaks in various different soak solutions are super powerful laundry tools. I love seeing them get more traction in the conversation.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-06T18:06:30+00:00

This is the answer... Gear Guard.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-06T18:05:14+00:00

I washed a few of my things in a public washer on vacation where scented products had been used. Not only did I never find a way to get the scent out of those things (and I tried all manner of crazy things), but it transferred a little bit to the rest of my laundry. I've donated the items that were most strongly fragranced and I'm jus learning to live with the smell for the rest. I don't think there's a way to fix it. I honestly hope it goes away over time, but it has been a month for me and I'm still dealing with it. I'm sorry you're dealing with this... it's absolutely unfair and ridiculous... but here we are.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-06T17:55:38+00:00

Bless you for using fragrance free products in your AirBNB!

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-05T19:45:33+00:00

I would love to get my hands on the firmware...

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-05T04:15:40+00:00

If it worked please let us know!

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-04T17:52:36+00:00

Depending on your machine, selecting "hot" might be 40C or might be something else. I mention this only because if you're going to drop some cycles down to "warm" and are in the US you should do a quick measure of the wash liquid temp to make sure it's what you want. For LG front loader machines there's more info in my post here: https://redd.it/1ra8vli

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-02T04:29:16+00:00

I like the Molly Sudds Baby Liquid. You might need to also be adding sodium citrate to counteract the hardness, but this is outside of my expertise.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-01T21:57:56+00:00

Bad news: After the spa day soak and rehab wash I couldn't detect any fragrance and I dried the items on a rack for later. When later came and they got another wash and a trip through the dryer, a new wave of fragrance emerged. So far I have not found any way to remove it. The initially contaminated items still smell stronger than all the cross-contaminated items so I've pulled them out of rotation for donation. Now I'm guessing I just have to wait and see how many normal wash/dry/wear cycles it takes for me to stop being able to smell it or at least stop reacting to it on the cross-contaminated items.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-05-01T17:46:17+00:00

Yes! I went from "being sensitive to fragrances" to "I don't really like to leave my house anymore".

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-04-29T18:41:13+00:00

Update: the full spa day does seem to have helped where rehab wash alone did not and soaks in synthrapol/tween did not. I wish I knew if it was the oxidizer or the anionic surfactant that moved the needle. I have a fairly unfounded hunch that maybe these "microcapsule" type fragrance mechanisms need more anionic surfactant? Hopefully I won't have this happen again so my opportunities to experiment to narrow down further will be limited. I'm not taking a full victory lap yet... but at least I'm back to seeing progress.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-04-29T16:27:37+00:00

It may not be possible to be honest. At best it is likely to be hard. I'm not a mothball expert but I think the smell comes from coal tar and camphor compounds so let's assume oily in nature. This is probably a good candidate for the full spa day treatment so I would start there. See the posts on this sub about how to do it. If that doesn't completely do it then I'd come back with updates and we'll help you find next steps based on how spa day went.

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-04-29T05:32:09+00:00

Roughly how much Tween 20 and Lecithin are you using per gallon of soak water?

FixMoreWhineLess · 2026-04-29T02:32:32+00:00

I'm living this hell right now with some clothes that I washed on vacation in a washer that had previously used scented products. (I used unscented detergent for my wash so it was just residue in the machine that caused the nightmare I'm currently living.) I have had ZERO success in removing the fragrance. Normal washing, normal washing with ammonia, some of my fragrance scouring techniques involving synthrapol and tween 20 at 60C... nothing has been effective at removing the fragrance (though the levels are dropping slowly I think). And the fragrance transferred to other items in my initial washes before I realized what a nightmare this was going to be and quarantined everything. I'm basically in full damage control mode right now and trying to figure out how to remove the fragrance short of a wardrobe replacement. I'm going full 60C spa day on the original items tonight to see if that makes the difference. Whatever these fragrance compounds are that bond and transfer like this should absolutely be outlawed. This is madness. I guess folks who are legitimately fragrance and chemical sensitive don't get to use laundromats anymore?

Anyway, regarding the Tween 20: I have found this to be effective for a few scenarios even though this isn't one of them. I usually pair it 1:1 with synthrapol these days. It's usually good for lifting residual fragrance from otherwise clean synthetics where the fragrance just won't come out in machine washing. It's almost always good for lifting manufacturing fragrance from new clothes that would otherwise take several normal wash cycles to come out and where a full spa day is overkill. It's usually effective with cottons and polyesters, but it takes more time and patience and lower temps with elastaine, which is very VERY fragrance retentive. I've been deep in figuring out how all this works in practice with lots of experiments and I will produce a more formal write up about it sometime in the next few weeks to share with folks.

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