On laundry

Up until we moved into this house, which has a high-efficiency washer, I had been using homemade laundry soap for most of our laundry.

The exception was cloth diapers, for which I used laundry detergent.  The reason being, that I was told that laundry soaps (including commercial ones) would leave a slight residue of soap scum on the diapers, which can build up over time and affect absorbency. 

When we moved here, I looked into whether the homemade soap would work well in a high-efficiency machine, and the answer was, "No, it will gum up the machine over time." So I switched, out of Christian love for our landlord, and we dealt with the higher cost of laundry detergent over homemade laundry soap.

Some months ago, Backwoods Home Magazine ran a short article about homemade laundry soaps being terrible because they leave soap scum on the fabrics.  I have the bad scientific habit of always running little thought experiments on claims that are made to me, and always looking for how my knowledge might be extended and increased.

So, in reading this article, my reaction was, "Yes, but...", where the But was that many of the clothes and linens that I had washed for years with laundry soap were still going strong, and hadn't worn out.

The soap scum residue seems to be actually protecting the fibers. We still have sheets and towels from the beginning of our marriage that haven't worn out yet. The towels are certainly dingy (we're not bothering to replace them until we get through the worst of our small-children-in-the-house years), and not very absorbent, but they have not worn out. The few I have gotten rid of, over the years, were the ones that were too badly stained. 

And the same thing for clothing...some of the clothes I was recently making replacements for were ten years old, and were worn regularly (weekly, more or less) that whole time.

There was also an account I read of a family dumped off in a remote Russian village, a few years before World War II, where the mother introduced the practice of washing laundry with soap to the villagers (who had been in the habit of never washing their clothing at all)...she told them it would make their clothing last longer. 

Surely removing dirt and bacteria will make clothing last much longer, but now I've begun to think that the soap had something to do with it, too.

I actually have a control set in my own house for evaluating the claim that soap extends textile durability:  the cloth diapers, which I have all along washed with detergents.

A load of cloth diapers will certainly produce more dryer lint than our regular laundry does, but there are some other factors that contribute to that also:  the flannel fabric tends to shed, the diapers get double-washed each time, and they need a longer drying cycle than the rest of the laundry does.

The working life of a cloth diaper around here is roughly two to three years, being used two or three times per week. That comes out to a roughly 25% shorter lifespan for a cotton fabric, I'm guessing, from washing with detergent versus soap.

In the present era of incredibly cheap textiles, that's not necessarily a big deal, but in a world where textiles are labor-intensive and hard to come by, that would be a significant saving of human effort.

As for the "ick" factor of having old soap scum buildup on my fabrics, my personal opinion is that it isn't going to jump off and hurt me. Other people's opinions may vary.

The other big difference between modern laundry and laundry in the old days is the water temperature used...the HE washer here (Read the Manual) admits that its Hot water setting is, for the sake of energy efficiency, not very hot at all.  In the 19th century, they used to give much of the laundry a good simmer in near-boiling water.  That probably removed an excess of soap scum, I'm guessing, while not completely stripping the fibers.

Washboards, by the way, work mostly by setting up and pushing little waves of water pressure through the fabric, not by the friction of the fabric rubbing against the board.