A woollen pullover needs washed. Housewife fills the Belfast sink with hot hot water and adds Lux soap flakes. They take ages to dissolve. Cool the water a bit and wash the pullover. Take pullover out and put it in the spin dryer. Spin. Throw in a bucket of water. Spin again. Repeat. The pullover still has soap residue on it. Put the pullover back into a sink of cold water. Agitate. Spin. Still soap residue.
Is the problem caused by soft water? Should a 'soapless detergent' be used? Is it okay to remove the residue using a damp cloth? Is it okay to throw a bucket of water into a spin dryer?
I recall my mother filling the spin dryer with water near up to the brim. The motor certainly would certain struggle until all the water was pumped out!
In a twin tub I think the water pump was driven off the turbine motor of the washer, so you could retain the water in the spinner. You could increase the rinse effect by lifting the spinner lid for the water to re-enter the centre through the clothes.
It would take many rinse cycles to get the soap out, despite living in a hard-water area.
Looks like you need less soap, more rinses, and /proper/ rinses in the sink: there's a reason a rinse cycle in a w/m takes so long. Or indeed to use a modern detergent.
I think so too, but going back to the question, what was the purpose of Lux (which I understand is no longer produced)?
I believe it was produced by Dri-Pak Limited (DP) for Lever Brothers then when Lux was discontinued DP continued to market soap flakes under their own name until the machinery became life-expired.
Well I dunno about Lux but when I returned from the US of A some 30 years ago, I brought back a bottle of Woolite (liquid soap for woollens) which I've slowly been using ever since (mostly for compression socks, only a drop or two needed). Not sure what the equivalent would here.
When a soap takes ages to dissolve, that is a warning that it will take forever to rinse later.
I can find references to using vinegar to remove the soap residue caused by hard water. But the kind of vinegar is important.
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"in general, adding vinegar to your wash will zap all sorts of residue; but make sure your use distilled, NOT apple cider"
The vinegar presumably, is helping to solvate the minerals causing the soap scum.
Apparently, agitating wool causes felting, and a lot of these procedures involve "soaking" rather than beating the piss out of the material while working on it. It's a guy thing, to want to pulverize the item to "get it clean".
There's even issues with how you hang the item, after you're done.
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Since you have been doing experimental chemistry, you are going to be repeating the experiment with an "expendable" test cloth first. That way, you'll have some way to judge the effects of the vinegar, without endangering the original item. Maybe you will be testing on a cotton item full of soap scum.
And the time the items spend in the discombobulated state, matters too. You cannot spend a month figuring this out. Apparently, soap film can build up on wool in any case.
"Everything you do to wool... is a mistake" [Some guy in laundry room]
I have a "very tiny garment" here, if you need an example :-) That's not an offhand comment, that's... experience :-) That's an item I used to wear while running in winter at -20C, and it ended up half the original size. The 60/40 mostly wool item, that's how it ended up. The same company later made a 40/60 wool blend, and there was no trouble at all with that in the wash. (It wasn't so small, you could not wear it.) But it also wasn't nearly as warm.
Our first washing machine was a twin-tub, in 1980. I don't recall problems with rinsing... it's going back a bit now... I _think_ there was a way to run cold clean water into the spinner as it was running to do the rinsing... a hose into the sink for the rinse water I think.
But we were old fashioned. She was doing the washing while I was digging the garden. (With a mattock, it was a new house and we got the garden where the concrete and mortar had been mixed. I really didn't expect pH11 in a sandy area!)
It would do the washing _much_ faster than a modern machine - but of course you had to watch it all the time.
Could be. The name is in the same font, at least. My bottle, being yonks old, doesn't list ingredients (but does list some items it does NOT contain), but does seem to be aimed at the same range of products.
We've used Woolite when but mostly use Persil Silk & Wool - a couple of bottles a year for hand & machine washing. It's usually cheaper. But any similar liquid for silk & wool will be vastly easier than granny's soap flakes.
I don't know why modern front loaders take so long. 1h30 for "easy care" and 2h15 for a hot wash of cottons. The machines in launderettes take about 20 minutes for the small machines and 30 for the large. I can see why a short time would be desirable, both for the customers and the owners; but is this because they are more efficient or do people just put up with inferior performance? (At home it doesn't really matter how long it takes.)
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