We all want to make laundry day easier and more efficient. We don’t want to feel like we spent all day doing laundry. To help you out, we would like to give you five tips on how to optimize your laundry day by using pre-wash laundry detergent. If you’re looking for additional laundry tips, such as how to safely brighten your clothes, be sure to check out our guide on how to bleach colored clothes without ruining them.
If you’re also dealing with tough stains or odors in your clothes, don’t miss our guide on How to Get Grease Stains Out of Clothes for additional tips on keeping your laundry fresh and clean.
1. Pretreat Your Stains
Pretreating stains is vital to successful removal. As soon as you splatter grease, ketchup, or the like on your clothes, treat it with a Tide pen, stain remover, or detergent. This can help remove the stain before it sets in.
Immediately soaking the garment in water with some detergent can also help prevent a stain from setting in. Waiting until later to treat the stain can cause it to set in and possibly ruin your garment.
If the stain has set in, use a good quality stain remover and follow the instructions — including the wait time! This is always hard to do since we get impatient and just chuck the freshly treated garment into the washer as it is filling with water, but this method doesn’t allow enough time for the stain remover to work, so make sure to give it the full amount of time required.
For some instructions on how to treat various stains naturally with vinegar check out this article at The Spruce. It takes you step-by-step through different types of stains and how each should be treated.
2. Be Patient
When you are laundering an item and trying to get a stain out, treat it with stain remover, wash it according to the manufacturer’s directions, and then inspect the item for the stain after taking it out of the washer.
If you can still see the stain, do NOT put the item into the dryer. That will just further set in the stain and remove any hope of getting the stain removed. Rather, treat the stain again, possibly with a different stain remover, and allow to soak and then rewash the item.
It might require several washes to get the stain out completely, so be patient when trying to remove a stain and give it the time it requires.
3. Use a Pre-Wash
Some newer washers have a prewash cycle that you can select. This uses pre-wash laundry detergent to help knock the dirt off of really soiled items such as sports clothes, work clothes, or cloth diapers. This helps to get the worst of the worst off and allows the normal wash cycle to focus on getting the entire garment clean and fresh smelling.
The prewash cycle can also help with stain removal and help your clothes come out of the washer smelling fresh. Don’t forget to put pre-wash laundry fabric softeners in your prewash! You can use the same fabric softeners in your prewash that you would use in your normal wash.
4. Sort Your Laundry
One of the easiest ways to make laundry day more efficient and to help your laundry to come out the way you want it to is to sort out your laundry.
Washing denim with whites or towels with delicates makes no sense if you want your clothes looking nice when they come out of the washer!
First of all, colors can bleed into other clothes. Because of this you should separate out dark items and wash them on cold. When you have a new dark-colored item, it might be a good idea to wash it once or twice by itself to help with the initial bleeding of color to prevent it from possibly staining other items.
Pastels can have their own load if necessary.
Whites get their own since they can be washed in hot water with bleach to keep them white and bright.
Denim gets its own cycle on cold.
Towels and bedding can be washed together on warm, but just be careful not to overload the washer. Large, thick items can easily make the washer get out of balance, so make sure that you have a full enough load to balance itself out, but not so full that it actually hurts the washer.
5. Select Your Cycles Carefully
Deciding on which type of wash cycle and the water temperature can help you determine how to sort your loads.
Delicate items need to be washed on a delicate or hand-wash cycle. Delicate silk, or other very thin materials, can easily be ruined if put in the washer on a normal cycle with other laundry. Do a very small load with similar items on your gentlest cycle.
Sweaters can easily be stretched out and ruined if put in on a heavier cycle, so keep them with the delicates or in their own load.
Dresses, dress shirts, or other nice clothes that aren’t extremely delicate can be washed on a “permanent press” which is a gentler cycle compared to a normal wash.
Work clothes or other heavily soiled clothes can but put in on a heavy wash to help remove as much dirt as possible.
We love doing laundry at The Dutchman’s Laundry and think everyone else should enjoy doing their laundry too! If laundry day and all of its various tasks is not your thing, let us help you out by doing your laundry for you through our drop off service! We think that you just might love laundry day now!
