• blargh513@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    OMG no, no NO!

    Baking soda and vinegar mixed together do fucking NOTHING to clean anything! It never has and it never will! You make carbon dioxide gas and sodium acetate. Neither of which do dick for cleaning.

    Stop fucking telling people to do this, it is 100% worthless!

    If you want to do anything, buy some sodium percarbonate powder and add that to your laundry. It’s the active ingredient of so-called “oxygen bleach”. Sodium percarbonate is good at removing stains and yellowing from white clothes and helping to take the stink out of smelly laundry. For really nasty stuff, mix up a few tablespoons in a bucket with hot water and let your stuff soak for an hour and then throw it through the machine.

    Either that or just spend a little more money on quality laundry detergent. Plain old Tide works quite well for most people. If you have a top load washer, set it so that it fills the tub to the max. Front loaders and super eco-friendly washers are fine for most people, but for those that work outside or do dirty things for a living, you need more water and soap to get your stuff clean.

    Borax or 20 Mule Team are good if you have hard water since it softens and will prevent minerals in the water from binding to the detergent such that the detergent remains available for cleaning your laundry vs just getting wasted by hard water. It doesn’t necessarily clean stuff on it’s own, but it just makes the detergent you have more efficient, thusly why it is often called a “laundry booster”. It does have some properties that do help clean, but it is most effective as a pH buffer.

    If you have hard water and nasty laundry, you can indeed mix sodium percarbonate and borax with your regular detergent. Soften and condition the water with the borax, permit the detergent to be more effective and the sodium percarbonate (which turns into hydrogen peroxide in water) will oxidize the filth in your clothes to keep things from being dingy and smelly without chlorine bleach.