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I am sure that this has been covered many times long before I became aware of this website, but I cannot find the answer that I am looking for. Basically, my question is: Is a fabric conditioner necessary with todays laundry powder such as Aeriel?
Re: Fabric conditioner
Fabric softener has never really been necessary, as it doesn’t play any part in washing the clothes, just makes them softer & scents them. However, it’s not great stuff for washing machines – tends to block the siphon pipe in the drawer as well stick like glue everywhere in the machine.
A cheap alternative is to use vinegar instead – cheap malt stuff from the supermarket works absolutely fine. Just all the same quantity of vinegar as you would fabric softener. It softens the fabrics but also doesn’t affect the absorbency of towels etc. Finally, it also keeps you machine a lot cleaner. The clothes will only smell of washing powder when they come out of the machine – not of vinegar.
If you want to scent the clothes then adding a few drops of essential oils to the vinegar will achieve this – lavender, orange and eucalyptus all work well.
Hope that helps :).
Re: Fabric conditioner
I’ll fill Odom in later if he asks. 😉
Vinegar is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard unless you’re intention is to smell like a fish and chip shop. It is a very weak acid that you are putting into solution, roughly about a 100/1 ratio if not more. It will accomplish nothing other than making you smell bad, if that.
Most fabric softeners are grease based. Basically they’re a big tub of grease that happens to smell nice.
As grease shears water off (chemical stuff we all know about, oil, water…) it is strongly recommended that you do not use it on towelling or anything else that has to absorb water and why it cannot be used on many specialist fabrics for hillwalking etc.
Personally I don’t like it, don’t use it and don’t advise people to use it. This is especially so where anyone in the family suffers from skin issues, it leaves a greasy coating that’s highly perfumed on the cloth. Whether it causes irritation or not is up for debate and largely irrelevant, the fact is it will leave a residue as that’s exactly what it is intended to do.
The only one that I know of which is different is Bold. Bold contains the only softener known that is clay based, not grease based. This can be used on towelling as it doesn’t contain any grease content and therefore doesn’t affect the absorbency of the cloth. It is however still highly perfumed with time release elements in it.
The downside (there’s always pros and cons ;)) is that Bold doesn’t have the up-to-the-minute technologies that Ariel does so, it doesn’t clean just as well.
A more pertinent question is, why do you ask? But at any rate, I hope the info above helps.
K.
Re: Fabric conditioner
kwatt wrote:Vinegar is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard unless you’re intention is to smell like a fish and chip shop. It is a very weak acid that you are putting into solution, roughly about a 100/1 ratio if not more. It will accomplish nothing other than making you smell bad, if that.
My understanding is that the purpose of adding vinegar is to soften the water in the final rinse. Because pH is a logarithmic scale, I thought the point is that even a little of a “weak” acid such as vinegar (pH 2.4) has a big softening effect on hard water (pH 8.5-ish), because it’s many hundreds of times more acidic than hard water is alkali. I’ll admit I haven’t tested what effect on pH it actually has, but a quick Google search surely shows a large amount of anecdotal evidence that it’s effective.
I appreciate you probably knew all the above already :). But I’d certainly be really interested to know why exactly wouldn’t vinegar work? The science behind it seems very sound to me, as opposed to a typical “old wives tale”. Hope you don’t mind me asking publically but I’m sure it would be useful to have it posted up, in case other people have the same question too.
Re: Fabric conditioner
Kwatt,
Thank you for your prompt responses. You did ask why I was enquiring about fabric softener. My reason is because after reading much of your advice on washing machines in general, I just wanted to know a bit more about the products that we have used up to now. My wife does appreciate the lingering smell that is achieved by using conditioner, but having taken notice of your comments I do not think we will use it any more.
I am still interested in the “vinegar” debate and will read with interest any further comments that are made on this subject.
This site has proved very informative and as someone who has always tried to service his own machines, I am always keen to learn more. I used to be told that washing powders contained a large amount of bulking agent that caused build up problems in the machines and water feed hoses and have thus steered clear of using them. However, I will now take note of your Ariel recommendations and see what the results are. We will in a very hard water area here near Portsmouth so we have installed a water softener and this does help in reducing the amount of detergent that we have to use.
Thanks once again for your informative site and keep up the good work.
Re: Fabric conditioner
Hi odom,
If you poured vinegar in a 1:1 ratio into the water then yep, it may have an effect but in the minimal quantities that we’re talking about here there’s no chance it would have anything other than a very minimal effect.
Vinegar is often mooted as an eco-friendly cleaning solvent as well as a host of other things but the evidence, as you say, is almost entirely anecdotal. There is no reports or research to support that and, on test, it does little to nothing. It is therefore reasonable to assume that, like many of the “miracle” cleaners that it probably does do nothing other than to make people feel better.
However you are talking here about a replacement for softener. Not softening the water, softening the clothing.
I have to ask, what makes you think that pouring smelly acid (in any strength) on your clothes is going to make them feel softer?
Is it simply because some people say that it will?
My understanding is that in order make clothing feel softer you have to “fluff” the fibres of the clothing up, make them separate and stay that way. This is why tumble drying often produces a better result on towels in particular, getting thumped about a bit and having air blown through them fluffs up the fibres.
I’d dearly love to know how vinegar accomplishes this.
If you get a strong reaction with calcium which causes the hardness in the water then you’ll get calcium acetate, a bit of water and a bit of carbon dioxide. The quantity of either vinegar or calcium would likely not allow this to happen but, even supposing it does, all you’d get is a slimy acetate coating the clothing rather than calcium. It doesn’t really change the fundamental problem, it merely changes the chemicals.
The reason it doesn’t change the problem is that, even if this reaction did happen and, I’m more than doubtful that it would, the acetate will not be held in suspension and will simply redeposit onto the clothing, just as the calcium would that you’re trying to remove… with vinegar.
If you stop and think about it, not believe all the claptrap that’s out there from self-proclaimed cleaning experts, most people with even a rudimentary understanding of chemistry will see that many of the uses that they put this stuff to just doesn’t make any sense at all. In this case particularly I just cannot see how anyone could possibly think that this would actually work.
I’ve looked at this and tested it and the results are, there’s no science I can find to back up any of the claims and, on test, the results are that it does nothing.
HTH
K.
Re: Fabric conditioner
kwatt wrote:My understanding is that in order make clothing feel softer you have to “fluff” the fibres of the clothing up, make them separate and stay that way. This is why tumble drying often produces a better result on towels in particular, getting thumped about a bit and having air blown through them fluffs up the fibres.
Only this isn’t really what makes fabric softener work – as you said, it’s effectively grease that’s attracted to clothing. It’s having electrically conductive lubricant all over the clothes that makes them feel soft. Tumble drying and fabric softeners soften clothes two very different ways.
kwatt wrote:I’d dearly love to know how vinegar accomplishes this.
My understanding (based on my GCSE science, so I’m open to being corrected), is that vinegar would work on two levels.
The first is to react with the alkali calcium salts (calcium stearate), which is formed with the calcium in the hard water reacting with the sodium stearate in the detergent. Calcium salts are a large part of what makes a fabric feel “rough” to touch. The extent of this, is, of course, debatable, not least because it depends on three huge variables (amount of detergent used in the first place, amount of vinegar, and the hardness of the water). However, it would at least have some effect, producing ionic salt and water, which would then be pumped away as normal.
The second way is that the hydrogen ions in the vinegar bond to the anionic fibres on some clothing, minimising static electricity, same as fabric softener does because it is electrically conductive. Again, due to the nature of ions, even very dilute vinegar would remain effective here.
I suppose it’s difficult because, let’s face it, theory is all well and good but only trying it out actually proves anything. Even huge companies like Arial do millions of different formulations, and they have much more than GCSE science behind them! However, I think there must be SOMETHING in it – clearly millions of people use vinegar, and it’s difficult to believe all of them are taken in with a placebo effect.
Re: Fabric conditioner
Correct.
Huge variables to contend with and no evidence to support that it works.
I can tell you that the P&G guys have tried this as well as many other things besides. 😉
TBH I don’t know how it would interact with all the various detergents out there or anything else that’s put in the machine.
However your calcium salts should be captured by the builders in a good detergent and pumped out as they are held in suspension. So, by the time you get to the final rinse they really shouldn’t be there.
As to the ionic properties, I can’t see any evidence of this being the case.
I’ve gotten a lot more laid back on this stuff, if people want to believe that it’s a good thing or that it works for them then great. But, when it affects the performance of the wash or the machine itself then it can become a problem.
Without cast iron evidence proving it works, a heap of merely anecdotal evidence, the failure of it to work on test and a bunch of very smart dudes in lab coats reinforcing that view… I’ll choose not to believe. 😉
K.
Re: Fabric conditioner
We’re going to give the vinegar idea a whirl.
It costs nothing to try and if we find that the end-result is satisfactory then that will be sufficient for us.
We’ve got one of those magnetic water conditioners on the cold water supply. I know that the science is meant to be utter hooey but, living in a very hard water area, we haven’t had to descale our kettles since installing the device.
Re: Fabric conditioner
Hi Odom,
I can see what you mean. I am a carpet cleaner by trade so deal with pH on a day to day basis.
What I cannot see is how it could soften the fabric, it may help rinsing though by helping to neutralise the remaining detergent residue. I have never tried it either.
I also do not use fabric conditoner, although my washing machine (16 year old Bosch) rinses properly so no detergent residue to make the clothing hard. My Mum had hard clothing problems, which was down to the machine (9 year old IAR siltal) using too little water to rinse, so I adjusted the pressure switch to allow more water in the wash and rinse stages and her clothing is lovley and soft. So it would seem if washing machines rinsed properly fabric conditioner would never have been nessercary?
By the way Ken, in my Bosch Persil cleans better than Ariel and does not make the excess foam. The IAR Siltal and Ariel do not mix either, even with half the recommended dose it foams so much the machine sudslocks on the intermediate spins and throws gallons of thick foam out of the soap drawer, however Persil and Surf do not do this, my Mum is also trying Daz and Bold but hasn’t got round to it yet. Surf is the least foamy so far, and the machine does not sudslock. It would seem from my own trial and error that different detergents work better with different machines.
The vinegar could plausably work if you look at it scientifically, whether it would work in the real world is open to debate. I have tried vinegar to: descale the kettle, clean the washer and the dishwasher and can tell you it does not work at all, won’t shift limescale, complete snake oil!
Oliver.
Re: Fabric conditioner
odom wrote:If you want to scent the clothes then adding a few drops of essential oils to the vinegar will achieve this – lavender, orange and eucalyptus all work well.
What in the name of heaven are you talking about? At first there’s the ‘blind them with science approach’ stating things like “first is to react with alkali calcium salts” and “the hydrogen ions in the vinegar bond to the anionic fibres on some clothing” and then because vinegar by it’s very nature sticks and taints anything it touches with an odorous obnoxious pervasive radiance, you suggest tainting its chemical action with “essential oils?”………..oils is it?…..oils…??
Sorry pal but your case has floundered on the beach at high tide on that one.
Jumpty wrote:We’re going to give the vinegar idea a whirl.
You’re just not reading between the lines here are you?
Jumpty wrote:We’ve got one of those magnetic water conditioners on the cold water supply.
Have you really? I bet it’s one of those that has a row of LED lights that flash in sequence under the sink, just to let you know that it’s working….oh yes! 8)
I also bet that in your area there’s a lot of households that have compulsory water meters….? If I’m correct on both counts then switch that magnetic thingy off under your sink for 30 days……..and your kettle will so no marked effect even after all that time, non at all. Leave it of for 60 or 90 days even!…No change……It’s a miracle and no mistake. Hallelujah!!!!
Sorry guys, I didn’t mean to hijack the thread and go a little off topic but I was attempting to bring this debate down to a far less technical level. (But if you want tech speak I can pull my own weight on the subject) But it’s totally unnecessary for heavens sake, after all we’re only talking bl**dy fabric conditioner, or are we?
Re: Fabric conditioner
Martin, explain me this if you will.
Before we installled the device our kettle needed to be descaled on a regular basis; now it doesn’t. The same goes for our gas fired water heater and we don’t get limescale build up on our taps.
Either: I’m delusional and someone is sneaking into our house to do the descaling; Severn Trent has changed the water supply in Nottingham; or the device (for us) actually works.
Re: Fabric conditioner
Can’t wait to see the new advert.
“Harry Ramsden’s chip vinegar,recommended by all the leading washing machine manufacturers” 😆Re: Fabric conditioner
Please guys, if the poster is happy enough to experiment then please allow it. It’s consumer choice as they say.
I don’t think it works and I’ve seen no evidence to support that it will but, to each their own. There’s not one manufacturer, insurer or detergent manufacturer that will say that this is a good idea.
I just want people to understand that if they use whatever they see fit in the machines, whether it be vinegar, eco-balls, soapnuts, dryer balls or whatever else that they do so entirely at their own risk. No manufacturer or insurer will cover the cost of any fault or damage caused by it, it’s down to the user and any remedial work that has to be done is fully chargeable to the user.
I have seen one manufacturer void a warranty over this sort of thing too.
In the end it’s up to the user what they do and what risks they are prepared to take with their property. After all, it’s their machine and their clothing that they could ruin, not ours.
K.
Re: Fabric conditioner
Martin wrote:What in the name of heaven are you talking about? At first there’s the ‘blind them with science approach’ stating things like “first is to react with alkali calcium salts” and “the hydrogen ions in the vinegar bond to the anionic fibres on some clothing” and then because vinegar by it’s very nature sticks and taints anything it touches with an odorous obnoxious pervasive radiance, you suggest tainting its chemical action with “essential oils?”………..oils is it?…..oils…??
Sorry pal but your case has floundered on the beach at high tide on that one.
Ken asked if I thought vinegar works because people say it will. The answer is no, that chemistry is involved both with detergents and fabric softeners. It’s not exactly complex science, though – acids reacting with bases, etc. If that “blinds you with science” then perhaps don’t wade into a debate ABOUT the chemistry of washing clothes.FYI, you can very easily prove that clothes don’t smell of vinegar after final rinse by trying it yourself on an old machine, rather than asserting that vinegar “taints anything it touches with an odorous obnoxious pervasive radiance” :rolls:.
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