Liquid tide bottle
My laundry pod nightmare. A few months ago, indigo stains started mysteriously appearing on my clothes after I washed them. Not all of my clothes, and not all of liquid tide bottle clothes in a given load of laundry; the stains were selective, appearing on mostly pink and red items.
They were absolutely impossible to remove. This saga started a little over a year ago, when my apartment building replaced the washers and dryers in its laundry room with shiny, new high-efficiency Liquid tide bottle washers by Maytag. These machines are designed to use up to 80 percent less water and about half as much energy than traditional machines. My first few washes with the machines were a disaster. Since they use less water, the amount of suds in traditional laundry detergent can have an adverse impact on performance, causing the machine to inadequately rinse the soap residue off of the clothing.
Despite my research and painstaking measurements, the loads emerged either still dirty or oversaturated with suds. There was either too much product or not enough. So I gave in, reluctantly, to laundry pods. I became convinced that HE machines were a conspiracy designed to force consumers into using pods.
Faced with a newfangled and environmentally virtuous machine that makes it unclear how much liquid detergent to use, why not liquid tide bottle use a laundry pod, with its precise measurements for liquid tide bottle perfect load of laundry?
After a few weeks with the pods, I grew to like them, as much as one can like a laundry detergent you cannot smell before using. I began to appreciate the convenience of the product: The pods saved time and energy, and most importantly, they washed my clothes.
Then, in August, the staining began. One night, when I removed my laundry from the dryer, I was horrified: I figured somebody had left a ballpoint pen in the washer, so I mixed up a bowl of OxyClean and left the items to soak for a few hours. I sprayed the clothes with my most-trusted industrial strength stain remover, Greased Lightning, which had previously removed years-old stains with ease.
But the stains only became a very slightly lighter shade of blue. A few days later, part of a gray T-shirt I was wearing started to irritate my skin. At dinner another night, my husband noticed a dark grease stain liquid tide bottle the front of my freshly laundered shirt. When I went to wipe the stain away, I discovered the shirt was totally dry.
Two tank tops collected blue dye on the sides. I felt like I liquid tide bottle going crazy. Maybe it was me. Liquid tide bottle the washing machines were leaking some unknown substance onto everything.
Maybe an unknown enemy was dumping blue ink into my loads. The final straw came when I washed a pair of brand-new sweatpants. I put them in the machine with like-colors only, and they came emerged with dark blue squiggly stains all over the back of them.
Nothing else in that wash was stained, and nothing would lift the mysterious ink. The specificity and the inconsistency of the problem was making it impossible for me to figure out. Some weeks all my laundry was fine; other weeks, one or two items would come out of the wash stained.
Sometimes the stains were huge, liquid tide bottle times basically invisible, unless you were looking for them. Some items, like my towels, turned bluer overall. Then it hit me: Could the source of the stains be the laundry pods? Besides the washing machines, the pods were the only variable that changed in my laundry technique. I became very angry, but determined to figure out the answer.
In order for a new laundry product to succeed, it has to perform as well or better than the industry standard. After they hit shelves inTide aggressively marketed pods as a way to tangibly improve less time, no more messy bottles a household task: Liquid detergent, meanwhile, is down almost 9 percent over the same period.
Pods first hit shelves in spring ofthe culmination of almost 30 years of trial and error. Consumers did not like the pre-dosed detergent or the higher cost. By the late s, laundry pouches were gaining popularity in Europe. Advances in water-soluble film technology meant that single-dose laundry products could be little bags of easily dissolving liquid and not dusty, messy powder pucksand U. This, of course, sells more pods, which already cost more per wash than traditional detergents. Could that new color formulation have contributed to the stains?
Was I using them wrong? Was I supposed to put the pods liquid tide bottle the detergent drawer? Was I a huge idiot, bringing this problem on myself through my inability to do laundry? I consulted the Maytag liquid tide bottle, which said absolutely not: DO Liquid tide bottle place in corner dispensers or drawer dispensers.
The emotions continued to pour out. That it was liquid tide bottle fault. It became clear to me that the pods were not liquid tide bottle dissolving in the wash, which is odd because Tide claims the pods dissolve at any temperature, in both HE and regular washers.
I had wrongly assumed that pods would work better with the new machines in my building, because I had so much trouble using regular detergent with them. I was fed up. A mop should not progressively make your floor dirty, a doctor should not punch you in the liquid tide bottle, and laundry detergent should liquid tide bottle permanently stain your clothing. It was time to raise the stakes. This time, a representative named JoAnna responded and told me to spot treat the stains with isopropyl alcohol, a suggestion that seemed extreme.
Why not just wash your entire wardrobe in rubbing alcohol? But I tried it. Surprising nobody, it did not work. I reported this to Tide and they said I had two options: Here is an excerpt from the email they sent me about it:.
I decided to do it anyway. A liquid tide bottle or so later, I liquid tide bottle my stained clothing, a box of 72 laundry pods with 68 remainingand a form I was provided with in a Tide-provided Tyvek envelope and sent it away. All in all, liquid tide bottle pods ruined four shirts, two towels, one pair of shorts, one pair of pants. I was happy that they covered the cost of my clothing, but unsatisfied: Until this summer, I took for granted my liquid tide bottle with laundry detergent.
I implicitly trusted it. We want to believe that technology improves our lives, that progress is linear, and that innovation can solve problems. Too often, technology addresses a problem but creates new, unanticipated, unique problems in its wake. I often think about the time my friend purchased a self-cleaning litter box for his cat.
The litter box did indeed self-clean, but the sound it made while cleaning scared his cat so badly that it refused to use even an analog litter box for a month. I won a small victory against Tide, but I will never get back the liquid tide bottle and energy I spent getting compensated for a laundry detergent that ruined my clothing.
My laundry pod nightmare Tide pods were staining my clothes. So why was Tide telling me it was my fault? Becca Laurie Jan—05— A selection of the damage. Sign up for our newsletter. The NSA will be in touch. Becca Laurie lives in Brooklyn.