Perhaps this is off topic but I don't know where else to post it.
Recently some washing 'powders' have contained a perfume which I find offensive. These perfumes appear to be totally resistent to being rinsed out. I am now reluctant to wear almost any of my clothes.
Has anyone else noticed this. More to the point, does anyone know how to remove this offensive odour?
Fabric conditioner?
Rinse them through with tomato juice.
In the Canadian wilds motorists always carry catering packs of Tomato juice with them, its the only stuff that removes the smell of skunk after you run one over.
Dave
I googled that trisodium phosphate is used to remove the diesel smell from clothes both by sailers and oil rig workers. It is very bad for the environment though so is no longer used in washing powders, but is the most powerful cleaner around. I don't know if this would work or not, but you could try ammonia in a wash as well.
P.S. one can find trisodium phosphate in Lucky Charms "magically delicious" cereal
Using a spot of diesel fuel instead of rinse aid would achieve the desired effect but perhaps not in the way you want :-)
You could try unscented washing powder (eg
However if you are not using a fabric softener any scent in the detergent should really be gone by the final rinse, and certainly after drying - if it is noticeable I'd suggest you are using too much detergent and it isn't being fully rinsed out.
so on, have failed to remove the odour. The possibility that I have become more sensitive is questionable because clothes which have not been washed so recently have no offensive odour, as do new clothes, which smell of nothing in particular apart from the odour which I would expect the fabric to possess.
I would accept as possible, if improbable, the hypothesis that some new component residue is not detectable by most people, but that I possess an exceptional sensitivity to it. That is partly what I am trying to find out. Since I am unlikely to be unique, if such a substance, noxious to a proportion of the population, is being adsorbed irreversibly strongly onto the clothes, perhaps there is a case for damages in law.
I switched from persil to ecover a while back. Recently I had the unfortunate circumstance where I ran out of ecover, and had to go back to the last dregs of persil. The perfume that lingered afterwards made me sneeze constantly, I gave up and re-washed everything I could find in ecover again after it had been persilled.
Ecover has a slight fragrance in the detergent but hardly any remains. There's a slightly stronger fragrance if you use the softner, but still much much less powerful than those terrible persil/ariel/etc brands.
Velvet
Very odd, in the interests of science I've just been investigating the output of the washing machine, things which have had fabric conditioner in the wash obviously have quite a marked smell. Those which have not however are virtually odour free when wet and completely odour free (as far as I can tell) when dry. That's using Kirkland powder from Costco.
Ahhh ... another sufferer! I am not alone then. I too am very sensitive to aspartame/nutrisweet, although I can tolerate saccharin. It is very difficult to find soft drinks these days that are purely sweetened by natural products such as sucrose/fructose, and not polluted by carcinogenic compounds.
Dave
There are several such examples.
You have my sympathy, that stuff is almost ubiquitous in processed foods. Not that I buy into the anti aspartame camp at all. It would be interesting to double graph the rise of artificial sweeteners and obesity levels in Western society......
Interestingly a recent article in the Guardian reports research showing the real secret to the French diet, high in butter and other saturates yet with stuff all heart disease may not be red wine. Portions are significantly smaller in France than in the US for similar establishments. So the trick is not to change the diet, just moderate it.
Peter
I am the opposite.
Aspartame is carcinogenic? In what concentrations?
Peter
I use washing-up-liquid. When I use a laundrette I make sure the residue in the soap box goes into the first (prewash) cycle. I use the cold water setting and the shortest cycle. Soiled stuff might get to go around 2 or 3 times but they come out clean.
I buy the cheapest thick detergent going and put it in old Fairy or whatever bottles and add a few drops of Zoflora disinfectant with an ear-drop pippete. All my washing is thus done with all the detergent dissolved and washed out by the end of the cycle. It started out as a convenience then I realised that powder soap, or whatever it is, just doesn't dissolve effectively at low temps.
I'd always find a machine with half a cup or more after use still in the soap box. The thing is, you only need a very small squirt of washing up liquid, something like 3 or 4 teaspoons full in my own machine more -obviously, in the larger, laundrette ones. I think between 5 and 3 second squirts would do the washing a workman can produce in a fortnight.
As an aside; I think that if you use real soap like Lux or some such, the first cycle should not have any added as the salt in your sweat makes the whole job worse. I believe that the fat in the soap is brought out of solution and subsequent cycles have to work on that too. Detergents seem to hold their act together better.
Ther ability to detect the somewhat almondy smell of cyanide seems to be an inherited trait.
My husband and I both find the aspartame aftertaste extremely unpleasant. One of the treats of my childhood, when I was ill, was steamy hot Robinson's lemon barley water - it is now made with artificial sweeteners, and is no longer pleasantly soothing.
I don't think it's meant to dissolve. There's a lot of aggregate in washing powder whose job presumably is to throw the stuff doing the work around the drum. Foaming detergents are not ideal for washing machines. I can remember as a kid seeing the local launderette waist deep in the stuff after a machine had broken down.
This, I suspect, is part of the problem. Despite the fact that most things are purer and safer than they have ever been in living memory, people seem to want to have everything scented. No doubt this desire is fed by the makers of scent, possibly even created by them.
However, despite all the interesting contributions, for which many thanks, I still have not heard as to what has been added (or taken away) to the new powders/tablets, or as to how the residual scent can be removed :-(
"stuart noble" powder whose job presumably is to throw the stuff doing the work around the
I think that adding some rubber balls or such like would do a better agitating job than gritty powders. Good old fashioned stone rubbing in the river having passed my generation by and not willing to risk adding a couple of half-bricks, I think I'll just keep it simple.
As for the foaming laundry; the damage was done by the foam. Too much detergent backs up in the pipes and vents and buggers the mechanism. With a detergent you just need enough to allow the water to wet the soiled garment. It helps the water to penetrate as much as it acts as a solvent.
Soap reacts with the greases in the the clothing to help dissolve it. You need far more soap to wash cloth than you do with detergent. That's a marketing ploy with the detergent companies. They tell you to put too much in. Laundrettes usually give the opposite advice.
But surfactants create foam when agitated, and powder doesn't. I think that's the main reason we don't use washing up liquid for laundry.
I think it's Surcare. I too use this (or rather SWMBO does). I seemed to have (fairly recently) developed a nasty allergy to some washing powders whereby if I touch wet laundry, after a little while the skin on my hands dries up and starts to peel off. Also if I wear a shirt that hasn't aired for long enough (however long that might be) then the skin on my arms dries up too, although it doesn't peel.
By using Surcare powder and conditioned this all went away, so I can only assume it's got something to do with the enzymes or fragrance?
Again, I suffer with these machines. They make me gag.
Happy days,
WYes, I too have found SurCare, but it has yet to be tested by my wife. It is an amazing fact that my local Sainsbury's which has recently introduced so many new lines into the same space that even chips run out if more than 3 people buy a packet (well, you know what I mean) has devoted a whole gangway to laundry products of which 90%+ are made by Proctor and Gamble. No wonder Sainsbury's shares and market share is headed South. P&G must be amongst the most unacceptable faces of capitalism.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.