r/laundry

My husband is a firefighter and on the side he does a lot of outside work. We live in the south, it’s very very hot here. His clothes are absolutely disgusting. I feel like anything i wash them with doesn’t get them clean or smelling good. Any ideas on what i should do?

The spouse works for a food manufacturer of pickled products - think cold-fermented pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, etc. Their work clothes are odiferous beasts. The smell isn't exactly unpleasant, but it's intense and it lingers.

This is not BO, but rather the smell of vinegar and garlic and dill, and it permeates everything that is anywhere near the production floor.

I can not get this smell out using any reasonable method.

I have a top-loader Samsung HE washer with no central agitator. It's older but still electronic, so it automatically senses the amount of laundry and only fills the drum so far. Stopping the wash cycle any time beyond the initial fill causes the cycle to stop, the water drains out, and the washer turns off.

The current wash system is a short cycle (about 35 minutes) on eco-warm or warm using liquid Tide Odor + Oxy with Febreze and a rinse including Lysol Laundry Sanitizer, followed by a longer heavy-duty wash (about 75 minutes total) with a pre-soak and extra cleaning setting, using the same products.

There is still residual odor. I've run 5 consecutive cleaning cycles with Affresh washer tablets to break down scrud and minimize lingering odors there. I have liquid Biz I've tried adding, but I don't think it's the good stuff. I've tried citric acid in the rinse cycle (I have fairly hard water) which seems to help but not enough. I have a sparkly new bag of Febu but haven't experimented with it yet.

Nothing helps and my entire house is starting to smell like the inside of a Vlasic jar from residual odor. Regular spray Febreze makes everything smell like garlicky sour flowers. Anti-scent hunting spray helps a little on skin and hair, but the laundry detergent offerings are way too expensive to use on the volume of clothing worn daily.

Does anyone have tips for breaking down atypical food odors on fabrics like this?

Some background: We wear a lot of merino wool. A lot. Every day, year round. Shirts, undershirts, tank tops, sweatpants, running/cycling shorts, skirts, culottes, vests, jackets, socks. We both work from home, and wool clothing is our standard "office pajamas." Think technical merino wool, like Smartwool, Icebreaker, etc., not more delicate things like cashmere sweaters, although we do, but that's not the focus of this post. Stinky pits are kind of a thing on some of our shirts.

I have been following this subreddit for a little less than two weeks, and so many light bulbs came on as I was reading the stickied posts (I am forever grateful to u/KismaiAesthetics). I have seen the error of my previous laundry ways, and I am now a convert to Tide Free & Gentle Odor Refresh liquid, FEBU, citric acid, and I've ditched the fabric softener. (N.B. I am eagerly awaiting the new GearGuard advanced formula that includes lipase along with DNAse, and will add that to our laundry cocktails in future.) Never mind that my husband is the one who actually does all the laundry each week; I am proselytizing to him, and he's on board with all of it.

BUT... what about all that merino wool that makes up >50% of our weekly (clothing) laundry? No FEBU for that, thank you, due to the protease. Lipase List to the rescue, and my order of The Steamery's Delicate Wool/Silk detergent just arrived.

Like the newly converted laundry zealot that I am, I grabbed the dirty wool clothes out of the laundry basket, a selection of previously washed "clean" wool clothes from the closet and drawers, even changed out of my own clothes and added them to the pile for immediate washing.

Washer: LG front loader, model 4370 something something, from 2017.

Dose: 1 Tbsp (15 ml) (our water is pretty soft, plus most of the clothes in this first load weren't really dirty)

Cycle: Cotton/Normal, Turbo Wash, Heavy Soil, High Spin, all the extra rinses (3). This worked out to ≈1h35m or so the display told me.

Temp: Hot. This is fine, because "Hot" on this washer turns out to be only around 35ºC in the wash cycle, max high temp of 39ºC. (I've been keeping a spreadsheet of avg wash temps for each cycle, and an average of 35ºC for "Hot" appears to be consistent across the cycles I've tested so far.)

All in all, I washed 30 shirts, 8 pairs of socks, 5 pairs of pants/sweatpants/shorts, all merino wool.

Results:

You guys. I'm impressed, so far. I noticed that, as I was hanging up each item to dry, the fibers just seemed much more relaxed. Previous wool wash loads with our old detergent always saw shirt hems and sleeve hems curling up and folding over on themselves, which I always had to take time to smooth out and unfold, so they would dry looking nicer. There was NONE of that behavior on any of the shirts in this load.

Everything also felt nice and soft, almost springy, squishy in a good way.

The smell is fine, although I wouldn't say it smells particularly like either "rose" or "musk", but it's ok. Very light. I'm sensitive to strong, and especially synthetic, fragrances, and this is... fine. It's not awful. I can live with it. Especially since I'm so impressed so far with the results in this first wash load.

I will post a follow-up after more loads, so I can form opinions based on more than just one data point.

I bought a NWT bra on eBay, when I received it, the fragrance was overwhelming. Likely not perfume, but possibly stored with scent beads or scented drawer liner paper.

I’m very sensitive to scents, I should have sent it back, but it was a good deal on a DC’d item, and I thought it would wash out. So far I’ve tried:

1. Washing machine, delicate cycle, Tide Free detergent, air dry.

2. Hang outdoors.

3. Hand wash, soak in Tide Free detergent, sun dry.

4. Soak in dilute vinegar, air dry.

I’m at a loss what next to try. I’m concerned about damaging the elastic fabric with anything harsher. Help?

I use deodorant and shower every single day, but for some reason my shirts (the armpit areas) always smell horrible and I can't get it to stop, for example, I'll wash my clothing, it smells perfectly fine, and then I sweat JUST A LITTLE BIT, and suddenly that horrible smell starts, it's like the little bit of sweat activates the horrible smell, and I'll literally put deodorant on before I put the shirt on, so like I said it's not an issue of normal BO, it's something to do with the shirts, how do I fix this?? I even bought an enzyme thing and that hasn't helped, it was persil advanced clean oxi + odor fighter liquid laundry detergent

I know the stance on fragrance, but I would really love to have a consistent all-around fragrance out of my work clothes. Are they really that bad compared to say, perfumes or lush body sprays etc? At the same time, I see quite a lot of mentions about the unstopables (especially no26, which isn’t available in my country)

I just tried smelling some of the downy fresh unstopables and I love it. Can anyone break down for me how bad it is, considering I do use spray fragrances outside of laundry?

Edit: I would’ve preferred the rinse and refresh since it has more ‘functionality’ and maybe less bad in some ways but as usual, it’s not available in my country :’)

i’ve recently gone down the rabbit hole and ordered Febu for the first time. I’ve added it to my first few loads and am noticing a very strong not great smell to my laundry. I’ve read about the potential for blooming, but I am so worried that I’ve permanently funked up all of our clothing. Can you lovely experts please confirm that this will eventually end? I use Ecos detergent for reference, which I know isn’t the greatest.

seeking advice from fellow divas… what are yall doing to protect the rhinestones on your clothes? i’m washing with cold water and hanging to dry, but every load i feel like im one step closer to getting eaten by the business casual monster hiding in my closet. my knights of shining armor are falling, literally, off my clothes and into the watery grave that is the bottom of my apartment’s communal washer.

and yes, yes, i understand in an ideal world i would be handwashing any bedazzled item of clothing. well in an ideal world girls wouldn’t be literally nailed to the cross of soul sucking domestic chores for having an entire closet’s worth of snooki’s weight in rhinestones!!! so there!!! (please don’t tell me to hand wash it all i KNOW that’s what i should be doing. anything but that. you don’t understand how much bedazzled clothing i’m wearing in a week)

edit if you’re looking for the advice: cold water where possible, hang dry. the missing pieces to my krabby patty secret formula were lingerie bags and turning the items inside out. plankton voice “wow. that was surprisingly easy.”

I’m sure this has been explained but searching isn’t getting me anywhere. Why do the powders need to go in before the clothes? Are there drawbacks to putting it in after the clothes are loaded? (top loader, if that matters)

I specifically searched and joined this sub just to say that I finally listened and I’m upset I took so long. I started using less and less detergent, and fabric softener and my laundry somehow smells a million times better??? Just an appreciation post I guess. I’ll never doubt any tips from the laundry community again 🫡