I changed to Zanussi 1227 & I am very unhappy with it as well because it uses so little water. Many times I took out the load to check after it’s been washed a few minutes in the washer, to my annoyance, my clothes or towels etc are not even completely wet, ( I tried half load to full loading the washer). It uses more or less same amount of water for the rinse cycles. So obviously how such little amount of water can do a proper rinse? Even if you are not bothered with the soap being removed or not, if you look at the water of the last rinse, they still look murky with dirt particles!

With the modern washers using very little water for rinsing, I noticed that in order to try to get so called efficient rinsing with little water, the washers are now programmed to have much longer spinning time in order to squeeze out as much water as possible from the load. With the laundry are fast spinned much longer; they get demaged or worn out more quickly; my new towels look as if they’ ve been used 10 years just after several washes!

Everytime I do the laundry, I have to spend lots of time to add extra water through the soap dispenser to increase the water level. I am trying to find a old generation washer which would do a more decent rinse even if it’s second hand.

Being a member of Thought Field Therapy (TFT)Association, I myself & many other fellow members have used TFT & various methods to test allergies for thousands of clients. Majority of people tested are found to be affected by most laundry products (detergent & conditioner) even though they are not aware of it at all, but their health are actually affected somehow. Few people get skin irritation by using them, but that doesn’t mean our health are not affected.

Just by smelling clothes which has been washed with laundry products, our sympathetic nervous system immediately show some signs of being negatively affected; (this can be measured with some equipment). How much worse when our skin are constantly absorbing the toxins from the clothes we wear or from the bed linens we sleep on, day in & day out. Eco Balls are found to be much more tolerable by the people tested. Ecover range is better tolerated than other common brands, but every individual is different. I use Eco Ball myself.

Many sources (eg: Dr Hulda Clark in her Cancer books) commented that most common personal & household products, including laundry products are cancerous or harmful. There are many internets sources give such informations.

We live in a unavoidable toxic world with toxic food & substances every where; the modern generation of washers add more nonsense & harm!!!

You make an important point that the presence of suds is not necessarily an indication of poor rinsing although it’s confusing as logically if thoroughly rinsed everything should be removed.

I remember hearing that the suds are added for the consumer only, as they don’t like it when they can’t see soap suds, which they equate to cleaning. As you say, they are not necessary at all and in fact inhibit cleaning.

The whole issue is a puzzle because how can someone judge if their washing machine is rinsing properly other than if the rinse water is clear? I even read an article in the paper the other day that says researchers have found that detergent doesn’t cause skin irritation or allergy - even biological detergent ( Biological detergents not guilty? “Biological enzymes do not cause skin irritation” ).

At the end of the day Which? tests say that most washing machines are poor at rinsing which should be unacceptable. The trouble is, I don’t get many people complaining about poor rinsing so maybe it’s purely theoretical in that they still rinse adequately for most people.

If I recall correctly, Which tests rinsing by measuring the alkalinity of the water (detergent is alkaline) and also comparing the results to a high speed 2,800rpm industrial spinner. Tests like this are good and have indicated rinsing is frequently poor.

However, some of the home tests posted here seem to judge rinsing by foam or suds. Suds must be present for genuine soaps to clean but suds do not have to be present for detergents to clean. In the case of a detergent, suds are still useful as an indcator during the wash that some active detergent is left over and therefore there is not a shortfall. But foam is actually a problem in the actual wash part of the cycle. It prevents proper wetting of the fabric, buffers the fabric from a physical agitation, limits the passage of dirt from fabric, etc. Foam is unwanted during the actual wash, so foam inhibitors are an ingredient of laundry detergents.

When the foam inhibitor gets removed by the rinsing then left-over detergent will create lots and lots of suds. They are usually thin and wispy suds. So paradoxically, as fabrics are rinsed and rinsed (particularly if they are rinsed a lot) after the washing part of the cycle then suds often increase.

Some posts mention how suds appear when washing towels without using any detergent at all. I agree there must be some detergent but it may be so little and be so dilute as to not be particularly significant. (Of course, the person with eczema can not tolerate even this much but many people can.)

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I might add an observation to posting by Nikki Jenkins (13NOV2007) in which Nikki takes her visiting Bosch engineer to task for saying what could be seen was only surfactant. To slightly over-simplify, not all surfactants are detergents. Laundry fabric conditioners are surfactants (usually cationic) but they are poor at cleaning. The majority of household liquid disinfectant is also surfactant. So are many hair conditioners. In fact, if a washing machine is foaming over due to incorrect detergent dosing then adding conditioner (a surfactant) to the detergent water (mainly surfactant) will dampen down the foam quite significantly.

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Just to make life a bit more complicated, some formulations of laundry detergent (Tesco Liquid Bio comes to mind) actually do contain quite a large proportion of genuine soap whereas something like Persil Liquid Bio contains much less. This gives washing machine “foam watchers” an extra challenge in order to determin whether rinsing has been done properly.

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All this is by way of saying that suds can be a very poor indicator of good rinsing. (And that knowing a little about detergents can cause misleading conclusions.)

Finally, I don’t know who this YouTube poster is but the video seems strangely relevant! http://www.youtube.com/user/Shakiralover4ever

Senior moment - or Washing Machine Rage !!

So I have to spend hours of my precious time rinsing, rinsing and rerinsing laundry by hand, spinning it out in the washing machine, and then starting the process all over again over and over again to get rid of the soap. For the last 3 years I have been too busy to do this, the result is that all our clothing and linen has a massive soap build up again, we are scratching ourselves to death, and I now have got a huge problem once again trying to rid my laundry of detergent.

It is absolutely ridiculous - AND to add insult to injury I wrote to Which and told them about this all those years ago and they basically said they couldn’t understand what I was talking about, that their tests showed that modern washing machines were very good at rinsing.

What a load of tosh !