A quick guide to keeping your laundry from knotting up

I started getting annoyed by this last spring after buying a new load sensor washer. I was always throwing in big piles of sheets and towels because it felt more efficient. My clothes were defintely coming out of the dryer like a big knot every single time I checked. Following the advice about not overpacking made a huge difference right away. I realized I was filling the drum almost entirely with fabric, which just doesn't give the water or the drum enough room to move things around gently. Instead of half-filling it, I started leaving about a full gallon of space in the top third of the drum capacity.

One thing I'd add is fabric mixing. I ran the back room at a laundromat for 6 years and sheets or duvet covers were always the ones wrapping everything else into a rope. Now I zip anything big and floppy into a mesh laundry bag, or at minimum button/zip it closed so it can't open up and swallow socks. Big items paired with a few smaller pieces instead of a whole load of them also helps. The tangle rate dropped massively once I stopped washing all the bedding togehter in one go.

The other thing that fixed it for me was shaking everything out flat before it goes in. I used to just ball up shirts and toss pants in still twisted from the last wear. Once I started giving each piece a good shake and laying them in loose, the rope problem dropped off a lot. Socks going in inside pillowcases helps too, they were the worst offenders for burrowing into sleeves and pant legs.

Something I learned the hard way after switching machine types is that the drum design itself changes how badly things twist. My old top loader with the center post agitator whould wrap everything around that spindle no matter what I did, whereas the front loader I have now tumbles items through the drum instead, so the tangling dropped noticeably even with the same habits. If you are stuck with an agitator machine, matching item weights helps too, because a heavy pair of jeans will drag light shirts around it and wind them tight. A mixed-weight load behaves much worse than one where everything is roughly the same heft.

Update: tried the mesh bag trick for my duvet cover and it made a huge difference, that thing was basially eating everythign else in the load. Started shaking each shirt out flat before tossing it in too. One thing I'm wondering now, do pillowcases and smaller stuff need the bags as well, or is it mostly just the big floppy items that cause the rope problem?