washing machine smells - follow up

[DM]

It's a few weeks ago now that we were discussing wachine machine smells, and following up on this I'm just reporting my success with Arfa's suggestion of changing the liquid we were using.

We'd been on Asda's own for some time, most washes at 30 degrees, but following a switch to Persil, IIRC, the smell improved over the space of a week, and has now disappeared completely.

After doing teh rounds of high temp washes, bicarb, soda crystals a simple change of liquid has made the difference for us.

Cheers, saved me stripping the machine back further.

David

[meow2222]

I just did a particularly bad one that needed a total strip down. What a pain. There was black mould and grey-white gloop everywhere in the water path, top to bottom. No chemicals shifted it, it took strong HCl plus rubbing to dissolve it all. How anyone used it like that I dont know. Makes me wonder exactly what the chemical composition of that grey-white gloop is. Lots of limescale, but what else thats so resistant to all the usual cleaners?

NT

[Arfa Daily]

Glad you got a result David. I had a felling that you might, following on from my own experience. Bet you've won a cartload of brownie points now with the missus ! She'll never chastise you for spending too much time glued to the computer, again .... ({;-)

Arfa

[lschalkwyk]

I would bet it's polysaccharide produced by bacteria. Working in a biochemistry lab, I used to use a technique involving buckets of a 7% solution of a common detergent. I found that the solution would ocassionally turn gloopy and on investigation it turned out to be due to bacteria that were able to live off the detergent.

That doesn't lead to any particular suggestions for getting rid of the goop other than that you may be better off with alkali rather than acidic cleaners.

leo

[Tim S]

DM coughed up some electrons that declared:

That's good. I think it's still worth collecting your towells for a good old boil (95C or whatever) wash at least once a fortnight - that does it for us. Generally, you know that periodically, most of the nasties are well and truely deaded, including all the inaccessible bits like the pump, filter and pipework.

Cheers

Tim

[Huge]

Bacteria which I was culturing deliberately in the early 70s in order to find out the metabolic pathways in the degradation of butyl-benzene-sulphonate, a breakdown product of detergents. I'm so glad I don't have to collect samples from sewage farms any more....

[meow2222]

Thats useful to know, gives a basis for finding out more. Boiling washing soda didnt touch it - is boiling caustic soda likely to be ok on the machine? No aluminium anywhere in the water path, just hard plastics, rubbery hoses, metal heating element - thats it really. I guess it should be fine as long as the machine doesnt have a cast ali drum.

NT

[The Natural Philosopher]

My general experience with this sort of stuff..you get it in bogs as well, and that is really nasty - is that you need acid to shift the 'coral' followed by alkali to kill the bugs.

Not together obviously.

But if its a sort of fatty waxy deposit, go alkali. If its scale-like and hard, use the acid as well.

[meow2222]

thats what Ive always done. Trouble is with a heavy deposit its unreasonably slow. Maybe should try something stronger than boiling citric acid, but what else would avoid attacking the element?.

NT

[lschalkwyk]

Were they fluorescent pseudomonads? I think that's what we had. The detergent was sodium dodecyl sulfate and they were quite happy on it as sole carbon source. Possibly we bought the bacteria along with the detergent...

LEo