Unless you live in a literal bubble you're going to have contagions.
The people exposed to the dirtiest conditions as children are perhaps the least vulnerable in their adult lives. Excessively clean conditions are a problem.
If you're immuno-compromised I'd invest in the right equipment, like perhaps a more industrial-grade cleaning system. The sort used by hotels can kill anything.
TL;DR: Only bleach and/or a high temperature in the dryer kills most of the bacteria. Various laundry detergents seemed to have no effect. If you are a norophobe, try to use disposable paper towels, nappies, etc. when you can.
Some people seem to think putting their clothes (especially denim) in the freezer will kill the bacteria that stinks. It doesn't, at least not for long.
The article seems to miss UV/direct sunlight. Don’t leave strong colours like red out too long, but it nukes washing. I’ve had a search but can’t any decent measures of what sunlight does.
Sunlight does nothing. UV radiation, which you are exposed to in the outdoors, will disrupt a microorganism's DNA, preventing it from reproducing (it doesn't kill the microorganism, though). There's no guarantee that just leaving something out in the sun will penetrate enough to be effective.
A glass window filters out almost all of the UVA spectrum, but you can buy a UVA lamp if you want to disinfect the surface of some item indoors. (DO NOT USE THIS LAMP ON YOURSELF). As an example, The SteriPEN uses a UVA lamp to sterilize water, but needs to be on for a sufficient amount of time as the water is agitated.
This site is pretty interesting in itself...like even clicking away from the laundry and checking out their tests of various products like hydrogen peroxide and such on their counter tops is interesting to look at
agreed. i really enjoyed the fact that she (as a phd in biochem) orients to many of these tests as experiments. in her test of the SteriPen, she tries water samples with varying levels of turbidity (the SteriPen is based on UV) rather than just trying one thing and declaring "woo! it works!" (which is all you'd really expect from a product review blog).
On the downside the site seems organized in such a way to SEO for Amazon link referrals and to drum up visibility of a vanity-published book series written and illustrated by her daughter.
Not that it isn't an accomplishment, but it feels... forced? And not in the way of someone inexperienced with web stuff and proud of their kid.
It has that auto-generated-from-the-previous-contents-of-the-expired-registration domain parking website feel.
Pages go on forever, disorganized navigation, boilerplate explanations duplicated everywhere, very little in the way of charts or tables or summaries, and most of the links about products go to Amazon.
That explains the focus on detergents and not temperature?
I was baffled she hardly even mentioned the temperature setting, here it is well known that you should run your washer with at least 60C if you want to kill germs.
Age-old wisdom passed from my grandma to my mom to me is that if poop gets on something, just throw it in the wash, even with other laundry (unless it's like A LOT OF POOP), on a hot cycle.
Always seemed to work just fine, now I'm horrified.
Yeah, I'm familiar with it, though hopefully not familiar familiar with it. As far as we know, it's some other kind of coccidia. Either way, there's a whole lot of washing and hand cleaning going on these days.
If the water is hot enough it should be fine. Just like boiling water kills bacteria. (And it doesn't have to actually reach boiling temp to kill the vast majority of pathogens.)
The chemicals in detergent are pretty powerfull (see Tide Pods Challenge).
Also, newer detergents contain enzymes which are particularly good at removing biological stains (but do they kill?) In fact, new washing machines also optimize their temperature profile so that they keep the water longer at ~30-40 degrees C, since this is the optimum temperature for enzymes.
For the most part, soap soap (not all this other stuff they put in detergent) is a mechanical sanitizer, not a chemical one. Like pulling weeds and throwing them away. If they find some place hospitable to land they'll go back to doing what they do. Weeding only kills the weed if it desiccates or starves to death afterward. Blasting it with petrochemicals on the other hand may destroy it. And some bugs. And some birds. And your two year old's sense of smell...
Soap creates a colloid with the germs and oils and dirt. Warm water intensifies this effect. All that goes down the drain and becomes somebody else's problem. Which might be good enough most of the time.
Cells are just fat micelles, and soap does a pretty good job at breaking them up. This might be considered 'mechanical', but people irreversibly lyse bacteria all the time with SDS, a very simple soap.
Not effective against mold spores, bacteria endospores, worm eggs, higher life forms, really tough bacteria, but soap does kill most bacteria you find in poop
Oh geez. I dunno why I spaced on cell membrane damage. You’re absolutely right.
But then what is she culturing on the agar? In the rinse cycle you wouldn’t have much soap left. Maybe something growing on surfaces in the machine? Something that a periodic dose of chlorine kills?
I expected it to sanitize as well as soap does, via mechanical removal. That it didn't do that well enough suggest to me, either that the bacteria are just too well lodged in fabrics, or that an extra rinse cycle (or two) are required, or that the washer was over-loaded.
Synthetic fabrics have a surface that bacteria attach to really easily. It's one reason gym clothes pick up smells that no amount of washing can get rid of. The only fabric I've ever used which doesn't do this is merino, but it's hard to find merino clothes other than base layer. Merino is so antimicrobial that if you hang dry merino training clothes that are soaked in sweat they will smell fresh.
This site is making my skeptic radar ping really hard... especially the referral links to buy 'essential oils', and all the carefully posed super-mom photos.
"Certain essential oils are proven immune boosters. We sleep better thanks to essential oils, and as you no doubt know, sleep is an integral component to good health. We soothe minor cuts and scrapes with essential oils. After switching to as many all natural, essential oil based products as possible, we’re quite sure that our exposure to potentially harmful (and immune damaging?) chemicals has been reduced.
The best thing about making alternative household products yourself with essential oils is that you at least know exactly what’s in them. If you look at the ingredient list for even a bottle of simple shampoo, there might be dozens of ingredients with names that you could hardly pronounce—whereas with DIY products, there might be five ingredients, all of which you know are safe for your body, your children, your pets, etc."
Why be bothered by the essential oils link? Her own experimentation demonstrates it doesn't really kill germs but might kinda, with her hedging her own results [1] so she's not preaching psuedo-science here.
I think essential oils smell good, so I add a drop or two to my homemade cleaners or hair products for example. Not everyone uses them for homeopathy.
EDIT: Here she is hedging her experiment, she seems properly cautious: "I can't be certain if the product is actually killing the bacteria or if it has just somehow stopped the bacteria from growing. I also can't tell how long it takes to kill the bacteria since the product is picked up on the swab and remains with the bacteria on the agar plate during the entire incubation time."
I'm hunting but haven't seen it, where would that be?
I understand authority-crisis, but does this invalidate her other findings? (Can you enjoy Ender's Game even though Orson Scott Card is a fucking weirdo?)
All 2 of them ("super-mom" photos) in an article with over 20 pictures of germ plates, and several thousands words and tests? And with very openly, and very modest affiliate links to Amazon?
Generally mommy-blogs are sketchy (people pay or give free product for great reviews), and this is a literal mommy blog, but I read the whole thing and it seems pretty legit. She even reviewed the ozone cleaning device and revealed how much of a scam it was.
There’s really no recommendation for a specific brand except the norwex+lysol combo, which she wasn’t able to explain why it worked.
I wasn't saying I think the information is necessarily bad, just that it's sort of in the "grain of salt" category, as many sites along these lines are peddling all kinds of quackery.
unless she's peddling bleach and avoiding top-loading HE machines, she didn't make a very compelling case for anything else....so I think it's fair not to lump this article into the category of website you're describing.
But unlike most "super mom" blogs trying to sell snake oil, she actually did verifiable research and invites people to buy their own agar plates and test everything themselves.
> Crystal Wash allows you to do your laundry with NO detergent! You put these 2 balls in your washer that contain special "bio ceramics" that change the pH of the water and allow dirt and bacteria to be removed naturally. The company claims that it is as good as regular detergent, natural, and will save you money. To recharge your crystals, you simply set the balls in the sun for the afternoon.
Is this a real thing? What's the chemistry behind it?
When it comes to stain removal, Crystal Wash does not work any better than hot water. And, when it comes to some important stains, Crystal Wash often works far worse than laundry detergent.
I mean a shitload of copper wire would kill mold and probably bacteria, but also stains laundry green.
However a 'bio-ceramic' that is supposed to go in your body hopefully isn't coppery or otherwise biocidal
If it's generating peroxide in situ, it won't kill anything until long after it eats up your clothes and nothing can renewably generate that much peroxide or else it would be used for energy, not advertised on infomercials
In addition to the info above, there's something quite sinister about the "bio ceramic" products tap into human psyche.
The first time you use these products, they appear to work--your clothes actually get pretty clean.
This is because your clothes still have enough embedded detergent in them to still be effective.
After a few washes, the detergent is all gone, and your clothes stop getting clean. But you've seen the product "work", and it's hard to change your mind. Eventually you give up but it's been so long that you don't return the product.
The article claims "The Crystal wash did not seem to do BETTER or WORSE than regular detergent", but I'm really curious to know how the author was scoring that. At least to my eye, the density of bacterial colonies in the "Crystal Wash" sample looks much more comparable to the density in the "no detergent" sample than to the "Kirkland detergent" sample. But maybe it falls under her threshold of statistical significance.
Even apart from the results of this experiment, the basic concept of this product sounds really sketchy to me. I'm not going to say that there's no way at all that mere exposure to sunlight could recharge a catalyst that would change the pH when immersed in water, but just about every pH changing process that I know of involves using up some chemical reagent, and exposure to sunlight alone seems unlikely to replenish that sort of resource. So it sounds like snake oil to me.
That seems like the other possibility, yeah. My eye sees what looks like a meaningfully different number or density of bacterial clusters on the "detergent" sample in that comparison, but I could pretty easily imagine it falling into a "close enough to be statistically indistinguishable" category. (I would have expected detergents to damage cell membranes enough to make some kind of difference, but I'll admit this is awfully far from my expertise in high-energy physics. :) )
This is interesting indeed and I appreciate the amount of work done, but honestly I don't see the point.
Yes, germs are everywhere (surprised?), so what?
First, you can't bleach all you house.
Second, even if you could, why do that? Our body seems to fight nasty stuff pretty well.
If you have some specific condition or disease, then just take targeted measures.
>If you have some specific condition or disease, then just take targeted measures
Did you even read the article? That's exactly what she says she is doing. When there's a stomach flu or other harmful bug going through the household, she is using targeted washing methods to rid those germs.
I have a hard time buying the idea that if you are going to catch stomach flu, it will be from germs from "clean" laundry. Most germs just get washed away, and you can't completely eliminate germs elsewhere in the environment, so that seems like one of the least likely vectors.
Sorry, but this just seems like OCD disguised by a bit of science.
Exactly what I meant. Yes, you can bleach all your clothes, but not your whole house.
Then, if you already have stomach flu, then I don't see how bleaching your clothes might help here. Take a medicine.
Finally, reading about stomach flu (I'm not a doctor), it doesn't look like a serious problem:
> Most people with the stomach flu require no formal treatment. The key to a rapid and safe recovery at home (home remedy) is proper hydration.
If it gets more serious then take a pill or/and go to a doctor.
you see news articles about norovirus all the time in the context of cruise ships because these are enclosed spaces with stable populations who infect and re-infect each other through fecal contamination and aerosolized vomitus. full decontamination (to stop the spread) without clearing everyone off the ship is very difficult.
imagine a house with small children (who are not good at personal hygiene) as a tiny cruise ship which you can never fully disembark, and then when the cooking/cleaning staff (parents) get sick, things get really ugly.
it's generally easier to clean the hard surfaces in your house (with harsh stuff like bleach wipes) than to clean the soft surfaces. that's presumably why she focuses on the laundry infection vector.
It is still unpleasant and if you have deadline in work or have to care about relatives or have any other duties or train a sport or are paid by hour + have bills, then you don't want to stay home in bed vomiting unnecessary. Also, if you have one sick kid, you probably don't want two sick kids and you sick at the same time on top of it. It is cool that it is not dangerous, but you still need to find baby sitting or stay from work.
If you are high school student who dont like to go to school, getting sick is fine. If you are anybody else, you want to avoid it even if it does not require formal treatment.
It's a serious problem for the 70,000 people who get hospitalized for norovirus every year in the U.S. It's even more serious for the 800 people who die.
And given there's not "a pill" you can take for it, I don't see how a couple capfulls of bleach is more problematic.
Kids get all sorts off of weird diseases that are hard to diagnose. The game of guess the critter whilst sleep deprived is awful. Bed bugs? Hand foot and mouth? Fleas? Skin sore? Chicken pox? You reach the stage where you are contemplating binning all soft furnishings. A tested way of washing things isn’t a silly idea.
Honestly, if you've got norovirus rolling through your household, the CDC's recommendation is to pretty much bleach as much of your house as possible.
And laundry as a source of transmission is pretty well known in infectious disease epidemiology. One of the biggest issues is not that people get it from clothing, but that the person who handles contaminated clothing is also quite likely to be the person who preps food. Norovirus only needs a very small number of viral particles to make you sick, and a kid sick on either end is shedding a lot of virus.
>Second, even if you could, why do that? Our body seems to fight nasty stuff pretty well. If you have some specific condition or disease, then just take targeted measures.
"Many people are confused and think that I want to kill all the germs in the world. This is not true. There is good bacteria in our bodies and our environment that is extremely important. I consider myself a "norophobe" and not a "germaphobe". " --
http://www.stopthestomachflu.com/about-the-scientist#TOC-My-....
And yet even the bad ones are important, because without them your immune system can't keep building immunity. If you have an immune system deficiency then by all-means doing research on this is important, but there's really no point in trying to get rid of all the "bad" germs just to get rid of them, because eventually that will weaken your immune system.
Synthetic fibers haven't been around long from an evolutionary point of view. Are you sure they don't encourage a novel pattern of bacteria growth that could be harmful to some humans? Anecdotally, synthetic fibers are known to easily start smelling bad. I often clean things with synthetic microfiber cloths, and I occasionally wash them in diluted bleach, because I noticed they can start to smell bad if I don't.
so, when my daughter has bronchitis and has been coughing in her pillow for several days, you don't see the point of making sure that pillow case is clean before using it again after she's better? Like, you don't think she might get a second infection?
because in my experience, kids get sick again and again, sometimes it takes a month to get through the cycle
It should be noted that for a number of "specific conditions or disease", the most effective measures aren't targeted. Things like...bleaching your clothing, washing your hands, etc. work well.
That's why things like that are pushed so heavily.
For towels at least, I do a "bleach load" every few weeks when I start to notice normal washing is not enough and they smell a bit after only one or two uses. After I was with bleach, they smell clean and I can use them for like a week before a normal wash. I try to only use white towels.
Granted this is a real life study with a large set of data sampling a small number of machines, though likely using the same city water. The culprit might be the city water, or the build up of bacteria in the machines from long term use of the city water?
Its difficult to find any evidence relating to bacteria in water systems, but its certainly not 100% disinfected, or free of bacteria.
The problem with washing machines is they are devices that are rather difficult to disinfect. If you were to take a brand new washer, as in never had water ran through it, you would probably see a drastic reduction in her results. However, after a few uses bacteria from the air, cloths, water, and other sources will eventually end up in the system. If the system is not vented, then wet spots will exist throughout each washing cycle carrying with it any bacteria.
With that said, what I am suggesting is the washing machine is the culprit for bacteria from city water, which is not 100% bacteria free. Add in the fact that High-Efficiency washers use substantially less water then older units, and you have a perfect bacterial soup machine. Older machines used more water, which allowed for further dilution and flushing.
Would the situation be the same if the water was 100% free of bacteria with a brand new washer that would be dried completely after each use?
If you had read the article, you would know that (a) the water was free of bacteria, (b) she tested an old HE washer, an old normal top-loading washer, a new HE front-loading washer, and a normal front-loading washer and (c) the problem wasn't the washers.
Some readers are asking what's the point since germs are everywhere? I was actually quite interested in this. As a practitioner of BJJ, a common rule among schools/dojos is to not allow you to train with dirty gis, and a lot recommend washing it as soon as possible after sessions. Staph is an ever-present (though not incredibly common) concern with all the sweat, rolling around, and close contact. A bit grossed out to read that washing doesn't do all too much to reduce germs and therefore chances of staph.
Though germs are a concern, body odor is a very practical reason to always train with clean clothes, and for some people it requires enforcement through peer pressure.
Staph isn't fun, but you should also be worried about HIV, hepatitis B, and other bloodborne pathogens.
Not all blood pathogens can be killed by traditional disinfectants, even bleach. You need to soak the affected article for 10 minutes with a caustic sterilizer such as Sporicidin or CaviCide (which unlike disinfectants will kill bacterial spores)
No training center I have ever seen cleans their mats this way. Roll at your own risk...
I'd be surprised if there are any documented transmissions of those pathogens, especially given they need more complicated uptake.
The issue with Staph is that skin-to-skin contact, or the indirect version mediated by a mat, is more than enough for it go to "Yeah, I live here now..."
According to doctors/nurses I've talked to, smooshing a mucous membrane or open sore onto material which came into contact with infected blood can be enough for transmission. Which is why competent BDSM dungeons clean their apparatus with cavicide before/after use, and why they recommend a barrier between a person and the apparatus.
I'd absolutely suggest it for those environments, but that's because, to be blunt, there's a lot more exposure of mucous membranes in those environments than your average dojo.
The open sore is honestly a risk for both - S. aureus loves it some open wounds.
There is absolutely 0% chance of contracting HIV through a mat at a martial arts studio, unless you eviscerate someone with a knife, stab yourself, and roll around in their blood thirty seconds after the evisceration.
That's just good practice in general, the salt & sweat come out easier when they haven't fully dried yet, and the bacteria won't have as much time to grow their numbers and make the garment permanently smelly.
I am anosmic who does laundry every 3 weeks. How much time does it normally take to become permanently smelly? Do you have to be drenched in sweat? Will the smell transfer to other clothes in the basket?
2) also depends on the fabric, but usually you have to be pretty sweaty, at least to the wet-armpits level. Just think of the level where you will be depositing salt on the clothes.
3) Not often.
If you don't want to do laundry right away, you can soak the salty clothes, squeeze them dry, and hang them.
I thought it was common knowledge to sanitize your wash machine every month with a bleach load to kill germs and whatever. Sadly though, none of the coin laundry shops I go to do that. When I ask they are like, "it does 3 cycles, there are no germs". Then people throw dog beds encrusted with feces
"If you wash a load of just underwear, there will be about 100 million E. coli in the wash water, and they can be transmitted to the next load of laundry," Gerba said.
The author of the post was putting a dirty water solution on the cloth. In her control treatments, with no dirty water solution, there were no bacterial growth, despite being in the "dirty" washer. sheesh
I thought it was common knowledge to sanitize your wash machine every month with a bleach load to kill germs and whatever
After decades of doing my own laundry, I'd never heard of that practice. Well, at least not until recently when I got an HE front loader machine, now I run a bleach cleaning cycle once a month or so to kill odor causing germs. But not to keep germs off my clothes.
There is a delicious irony in what you are saying.
More than likely, the reason that you perceive an odor is because your body is trying to keep the germs off. So from an evolutionary standpoint, you are probably running a bleach cycle to keep germs off your clothes.
Partly this is a design flaw with front loaders. Old school washing machine it’s easy to leave the door open when not in use. So everything dries out and you don’t get mildew (if your machine is like mine you are smelling mildew).
Front load the damned door smacks you in the shin and you close it. Creating a nice little terrarium to grow stuff in.
I throw a little white vinegar into the prewash every time I launder cotton. Keeps the mildew under control and helps with hard water.
Check out the top load HEs. The Japanese were using that design for a long time.
We have had the same front loader for twenty years and my girlfriend wants that door closed. We have it always closed and never had a problem with mildew. Don't use bleach very often either. Maybe mildew comes into the washer from the air and once you get it you never are without it. If you always keep it shut, the mildew never contaminates the washer. I'm also in the East Bay where humidity is not stupid high and we don't have mildewy things to wash often. That might be part of our luck.
Here is an experiment whose results I'd pay for. Who to fund it; NIH or NSF? They are always asking for the societal impact of the research to be performed.
> My sister Christy has an older top loader (not HE). She washed this laundry on hot and added the 1/2 cup chlorine bleach directly to the wash water and it was very, very clean. She measured the temperature of her wash water when the tank filled up using her meat thermometer and it was 130 degrees F. She used Sam's club detergent. Her laundry was perfectly clean (to the limits of my detection abilities).
So, 130F is just under 60C - what's usually the minimum considered to kill bacteria. While I haven't measured the actual temperature, my aging, second hand washer have three "white" programs: "hot" is 90 C, and there are two rated 60C. I'd never assume any of the other programs had a sterilising effect.
If "hot" is just 60C, and often not that - I can see a need to use bleach for some loads (or other means of killing off bacteria) if the norm is to use warm (not hot) water for washing.
Would be interesting to see similar test with just water (no soap, bleach) and a 90C degree program.
I'd guess the results would be "dotted middleground" like many of the test here.
Also would be nice to see how hanging in the sun would effect otherwise clean clothes (airborne bacteria vs uv death ray stand-off - might be meaningless without checking for type of bacteria).
An interesting side effect here is that the house water heater has its own temperature control. For years people have been turning down the temperature setting on their water heaters to save energy, as a result the typical house water heater might be set to 60C (130F) and the washing machine was doing the best it could.
Clearly not all of them do :-) But curious as to the relative ratio I discover that best buy has a separate listing for machines that include an internal water heater. According to their web site, of the models that Best buy sells the population is about 40% (54 models with internal water heaters over a population of 138 models)
Not sure if you're joking, but no, that's not the reason. At some point I hooked up an electricity consumption meter, and it was a surprisingly short timespan that the machine used for heating. The draw was around 1-1.5 kW during the heating phase.
Your machine has longer and shorter programs, my 60C wash takes about 3 hours by default while a quick was is obviously considerably faster.
"Industrial" washing machines are typically faster (for reasons) than domestic ones, and the difference is pretty much that they simply use more water.
I just find this broad statement incorrect - sure, my washing machine has a default cotton program that takes 3 hours, but it has a variety of other settings which are much quicker and just as good - I always use "mixed colours" setting which takes 1:20h, or if I'm in a hurry there's a "quick" setting which takes 60 minutes - surely that's not long by any standard?
60 minutes is reasonable. IIRC my mixed colors setting (what I use except for bedding or towels) takes 45 min. I don't have an eco mode. Since we don't have a water heater in the washing machine itself, the only thing that would really save any electricity would be to turn off the spin cycle, but I like dry clothes so that's not gonna happen ;)
My "fast" cycle takes 40 minutes. How is that slow? Sure, if you set it to ultra power saving mode (in my case this is the default) it'll take hours, but that is just the environmentally conscious thing to do. Not to mention it's better for your wallet.
Do they? My dishwasher pulls from both the hot and cold water lines. This is evidenced by the fact that although usually one has to run either tap for 2-3 min to get non-tepid water, when the dishwasher is running both taps dispense water of extreme temperature instantly.
I guess it depends on whether you're more concerned about water efficiency or energy efficiency. If you're OK with not reusing the water, the building's water heater (especially in a multi-unit dwelling) is going to be larger and thus more energy efficient (also possibly slower, providing large quantities by dint of its tank) than the smaller heating element in a dishwasher. And you can just trickle a little bit in throughout the cycle to keep it hot.
I think you got the terms mixed up here - electric heating is far more efficient(for every 1kWh of energy used, almost all of it goes into heating water) than using gas, but electricity is also more expensive so even taking account lower efficiency of gas heating it's usually cheaper anyway.
While vaguely modern European ones generally do, American ones often don’t. I suspect this is down to the 120V power; with normal wiring you can only get about 2kW if not less, vs about 3 on a European system.
But that said, it would not be hard to run 240V to washer, so that can't be the reason.
Do Europeans typically heat water with electricity? That might be the reason - if you are anyway using electricity, you might as well let the washer do it.
In the US natural gas water heaters are very common (it's more efficient). And natural gas dryers too.
No, it is typically done with natural gas still (at least, that is the kind I see almost everywhere). A lot of new housing developments use electricity though (occasionally combined with solar heating tanks).
No, most water heating in most places in Europe is gas.
Modern front-loading washing machines, especially those managing an A or better on the EC's energy rating system, tend to use very little water, though. Depending on the plumbing system, by the time the potential cold water in the hot water pipes had run through, you might not get very much hot water at all before you were done, so you'd have to heat electrically anyway.
Huh...I moved into a house about 2 1/2 years ago and the water heater I believe is set to only 122 (Maybe 126? I know it's in the 120s) and I never changed it because it seemed hot enough.
I have a tankless water heater, though. The water won't be at 140F for very long, so I can't imagine it actually killing very much bacteria.
"Don't do that. You risk legionnaires disease. Set the temperature to at least 140F."
How does water heater temperature below 140F increase the risk of getting legionnaires disease?
Also, I always wash my clothes on warm, never on hot, because I don't want my clothes to shrink.
Many clothes manufacturers also label the clothes they make with directions saying to only wash on warm or cold. Otherwise, presumably, the clothes might get damaged.
> How does water heater temperature below 140F increase the risk of getting legionnaires disease?
At 140F or above it's killed. Around 100F it thrives. It's one of the rare bacteria that do well in hot water, and is naturally found in our water supply (as opposed to exotic locales).
Don't do that. You risk scalding burns. Far more people get scalded by tap/shower water that is too hot than contract legionnaires by several orders of magnitude.
120F is the max recommended hot water temperature in the International Plumbing Code.
120F is the temperature at the tap. Your hot water tank should be hotter, and you should have a tempering/mixing valve at the tap.
And not at the dishwasher or washing machine.
> Far more people get scalded by tap/shower water that is too hot than contract legionnaires by several orders of magnitude.
First of all virtually no one actually sets their tank at 120F.
Second:
"It is estimated that Legionnaires' disease is the cause of between two and nine percent of pneumonia cases that are acquired outside of hospital." [1]
"There are an estimated 8,000 to 18,000 cases a year in the United States that require hospitalization for legionnaires" [1]
"11,028 scald burns in children younger than 3 years old annually." [2]
"8,620 visits per year among Adults Aged ≥65 Years" [3]
I don't have numbers for the full population, but your "several orders of magnitude" is clearly quite off. At best it's a single order of magnitude - and that's only because almost no one actually sets the temperature so low.
If they did the number would swing.
And don't forget the pneumonia rates. This is not some rare unheard of disease.
Serious question - people connect their washing machines to the hot water line? I have lived in about 8 different houses in UK so far and I have never ever seen this - it's just the cold water line that connects to appliances like washing machines and dishwashers.
Yes. Some washing machines have both hot and cold inputs, though it seems less common nowadays. My gas combi-boiler heats water more cheaply than my washing machine, so it makes sense to use it. However, washing machines use much less water these days so perhaps the savings are marginal now.
Interestingly this is the 'more common' set up in the US. Hot water line, cold water line, and 110V power. I would not be surprised if the speculation in this thread about the lack of power available to do a local heater is a common issue. With a 220V mains you have a lot more power available at every plug, in the US the "220V" plugs are special and are usually dedicated to something like an oven or a dryer or other high power device.
Related to germs, how often do people clean their keyboards/mice/electronic surfaces in their office. How come tech companies don't have such a service? Would people be interested in it?
That totally depends on your setup. But in my case, I keep a container of 90% isopropyl alcohol on my desk to wipe away my keyboard, mouse, laptop surface, desk, etc. regularly. It certainly seems easier than having some service take it away for a day or even a few hours.
tl;dr Only chlorine bleach and certain washers with a "sanitize" setting reliably sanitize laundry.
With bleach you have to make sure you add it to the water at the right time which a malfunctioning dispenser can fail to do (and you might not realize it), but apart from that it works reliably and even with cold water. A "sanitize" setting can get similar results but it depends on the machine; her neighbor's didn't work as well as hers. Unfortunately non-chlorine bleach and "sanitizer" additives do not reliably sanitize.
The obsessiveness of the post can given the impression that this is someone who's a germaphobe, but she actually notes that it's not necessary to kill germs most of the time. She's just motivated to figure out how to effectively sanitize in the cases where you want to do it, like a household illness or cloths used to wipe up raw chicken.
For example, Clorox recommends using 1/2 cup of Clorox regular bleach in laundry. That's 8 tablespoons worth. That's on the low end of what the CDC recommends per gallon of water for disinfecting something that's contaminated with Norovirus (a viral stomach bug especially common in the winter).
Norovirus is also pretty heat stable, though the sanitize setting should get hot enough, though it's not clear if its hot enough for long enough.
My Samsung washer I bought 10+ years ago has a sanitize setting that releases steam and silver ions into the wash. Used for Bedding / Sheets / Towel wash cycles.
European washing machines usually have the "almost boiling" setting: 95 degrees Celsius. I use it for linen and towels. Other types of cloth don't bear this so well.
The issue I suspect caused this is all of the newer energy efficient washers/ dryers. The author tested a Samsung dryer. I recently lived in apartment with a similar model, and it was terrible. When visiting parents I was stunned at how well their older washer/dryer worked. The clothes came out much more clean too.
In my experience the newer energy efficent washers/dryers are almost total garbage compared to the older ones. I would love to see this experiment repeated with an older 90's kenmore or whirlpool or really any brand from the 90's or before.
I love the idea of saving energy, and energy efficient laundry sounds like a great idea on the surface, but what I think happened was the government put regulations in place without really considering the actual impact this would have on the quality of the washers/dryers.
Growing up in Korea, and living in the US for 5+ years now, what I've heard is that American washer models are so forceful that they wear clothes out. If you are accustomed to such washers (and clothes made with such expectation) I can see how you think the newer models are not as good. But I would choose a Samsung/LG washer over Whirlpool any day, if the prices were the same.
Compared to Korea, I'd think that tumble drying is the main culprit behind wearing clothes out. Anecdotally when I first moved to Korea I had a huge top-loading Samsung washer that made insane amounts of lint.
Front-loaders are vastly different between the North American market and Europe or Korea. I remember my friend's brand new LG in California would run an eco-friendly cycle in 40 minutes. A similar model in Europe takes 4h30!
That's not true of modern front-load washers. At my old (UK) flat we had an old Beko front-loading clunker. It worked perfectly well but was very noisy and took a long time (not 4 hours though! maybe 1.5 - 2 hours).
At my current place we have a much more modern one where a fast/economy cycle takes 36 minutes. It's nice and quiet too.
I'm specifically talking about top-of-the-line LG and Samsung eco-friendly washers. Check out their specs if you don't believe me, I had one of these. 4 hours at 40C and nearly 5 hours at 60C. It never bothered me though.
The washers also sometimes lie about how long will something take. Mine claims 40 almost full liad will take 3 and half hours, then twenty minutes later it claims two and half hours remaining and then it finishes hour later.
My bosh front loader does a 40°C cotton wash in just under 5 hours, or if I switch it to a 40°C mixed load it does the same content in 60 minutes, or 40 minutes if I tell it to consume more water and electricity.
I have no idea what the difference between the cotton and the mixed load settings is, but I usually do the shorter cycle if I have a lot of loads to do.
I guess if you're setting it running in the morning and then heading out for the day, 4-5 hours isn't a problem. But often I end up doing all the laundry on one day: clothes as well as towels, bed sheets, etc, in multiple loads, and don't want to be waiting around too long for each load to finish...
Slow wash cycles are more efficient. Loosening the dirt by soaking means that less agitation is required. Manufacturers cheat the mandatory efficiency tests by making the default cycle very slow, but offering faster cycle settings. My washing machine takes nearly four hours for a standard cotton cycle, but has a "speed perfect" button that reduces the wash time to under an hour. I always use the fast setting.
But you're not comparing like for like. The machine you list also has a "turbo wash" (heavily promoted on the link you provide that only takes one hour. That's an eco mode full load.
And for the comparison to be correct you need to compare an eco mode quick wash - normally a light load.
I'm trying to. The standardized annual power consumption that is advertised on the energy rating is only accurate if you use the default settings for 40 and 60°C cotton cycles. And that is effectively 4 hours at 40°C for a partial load. I saw the advertised "turbowash" cycle, however while it's supposed to be energy efficient, you have to take LG's word for it.
In the US, while models differ in size, if you look at a similar price range and load capacity, you'll see that numbers used for the energy rating are pretty similar (around 100 kWh or less). But, to my knowledge, the default cycles are fairly short. Sadly neither Samsung nor LG seem to publish cycle length in their manuals.
If it's old, then it was probably made before the EU regulations about eco-friendly modes. Newer machines still have the fast modes, but they also have super-long eco-friendly modes. The manual will identify which of the machine's modes comply with the regulations:
I've noticed that Americans seem to tumble dry everything. Here in New Zealand anyone with enough yard space for a washing line generally air drys their clothes unless it's rainy. In fact most of my clothes have Do Not Tumble Dry on the label, although that message is often a bit overzealous and can certainly be selectively ignored.
A lot of developments in America these days specifically ban clothesline drying because it's associated with, well, being poor. Never underestimate the zealousness of American HOAs, condo boards, and landlords in wanting to keep up appearances.
Electric dryers are also a huge environmental burden due to electricity consumption. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think electric dryers require many power plants worth of electricity. In many parts of the world, air drying is normal.
If anyone is looking for ideas on how to make the world a better place, look into figuring out how to shift the culture so that air drying becomes more common. Also composting toilets.
Edit: Drying clothes uses 56 billion kWh of energy in the US.[1] Another related area that needs work is standby power.[2]
US uses 3000+ billion kWh of electricity so dryers are meaningful but not that huge of an impact. I think there are better areas to focus such a campaign.
It's something though, and the rest of the world is following the US in many ways. As electric dryers increase with the population and development in places like Asia and Africa, the numbers will increase.
Sure, it would be a net gain. I am just saying replacing 2% of fossil fuel production with wind/solar seems a lot easier than getting 300+ million people to do something else to save under 2% of electricity usage.
Socially, improving commuting infrastructure so people waste less gas would easily have a larger benefit and you are not going to fight nearly as hard.
Etc etc, this might be top 50 but it's not a top 10 and it's hard.
The win would be in mindset shift. How are 300+ million going to care about dryers but not all the other growing ways to be enviro-conscious like avoiding the stack of plastic packaging you get from ordering food delivery?
People waste so much energy without thinking about it and for reasons that aren't particularly more convenient, like using disposable dishware instead of just rinsing off your plate when you're done. I look around at my peers even here in Mexico and see a shift, like asking for no straw when ordering a michelada.
So focusing on the specific energy usage of dryers begins to sound near-sighted. Nobody suggested that dryers alone cause all waste.
The disposable dishware, I saw it in the US, and it's just the most unbelievable thing I can think of. Having grown up in Europe, I was astonished to see people actually eat out of disposable dishware. I'd expect it at a party with a ton of people, because then you just throw everything away, but for normal daily life? Insane wastage.
Thin paper plates for example have rather minimal environmental impact. They are actually better for the environment than running a nearly empty dishwasher.
PS: For manufactured products cost is often a reasonable first approximation of environmental impact. When you get 300 paper plates for 2 cents each they really can't take many resources to manufacture. Further, by ending up in a landfill they actually act as a carbon sink.
Hand washing does not get dishes as clean. 70+C Water is useful in this context as it kills off bacteria which can help cut down on disease transmission.
You can easily do in door clothes drying in most areas especially if you're single. Combine with a 70+C wash cycle and cloths should be fairly close to sterile when you start.
The likes of Comsumer Report have tended to find that modern front-loading machines are almost universally more effective than the old low-efficiency top loaders popular in the US, and can also attain much higher temperatures (fairly basic models can do a >90 degree C wash, say). So that’s probably not it.
Though there might be an element of misuse. My machine warns in the manual to do a 60or 90 degree wash with no clothes every couple of months to clean the machine. I suspect most people don’t do this.
Would it be necessary to do this wash without clothes? I missed that bit and generally do a high temperature wash with my sheets figuring I am killing two birds with one stone...
Should be fine with clothes. My Siemens has a cleaning reminder that turn on after a month or so unless at least one wash with 60C or higher has been done.
From what I read, she did a few blots of clothes washed with her parents' and sister's clothes that had been washed with older style washing machines, so the issue can't entirely be the new washing machines.
I disagree. You can still put the proper settings on the newer High Efficiency washers, at least; and they do wash clothes much better than the older models, especially deep stains, due to much better rotation on the side-loading machines. I always select the maximum possible cycle on HE washers, and was never disappointed with the results, especially compared with the older models.
As for the driers, if your coloured clothes have that whitish undertone that suggests they've been through a good drying in your drier, then I think you're doing it wrong. I was so disappointed how much my clothes would wear out in the American driers that I'd always make sure to only use them on the lowest setting possible, even for jeans and such. Definitely not missing any old non-HE driers; you're not really supposed to kill the bacteria with the heat of the drying anyways, and using hot water is much more efficient for that.
What I don't get is why those machines are so eager on saving water. The amount of water used costs so much less compared to the electricity (at least here in Germany) but on some kinds of load the clothes get barely wet. Making it heat up slower or using more efficient motors would be enough IMO. Or at least add a button that reads "waste a shitload of water".
My washer is sitting next to the kitchen sink and I just manually add a huge load of water every time I turn that damn thing on. I installed a faucet with a hose just for that reason.
I hate the new machines that weight the laundry before adding the water. I live in BC, Canada, in a literal rain forest. We have more water than we know what to do with. I have relatives who are about to scrap their new machine because it never uses enough water. They run the cycle twice just to ensure the soap is properly rinsed off. And they get their water from a solar-powered well!
Might have something to do with the various eco- and energy efficiency labels [1]. I think they show absolute values for water and energy use, but wash efficiency is rated with letters (and the scale is probably set so that most get the A rating). This might create an incentive to try to push those figure down which need to be shown and just make the machine take more time. If you have already reached the maximum rating for washing quality, there may not be point to improve that at the expense of the other figures.
Most of the washing machine purchasing decisions must be based on the marketing fluff. I don't think there are many publications even on EU level which run and publish comprehensive tests for these machines. Without such objective tests, it is pretty much impossible to base the purchasing decision on hard facts (except those mandated to be reported by EU).
I remember reading that some washing machines actually did not even obey the request to use high temperatures, because the manufacturer had noticed that they can match the EU target for wash efficiency also with lower temperatures. Can't find any reference for this, so take this with a grain of salt.
I’m not sure your point. That doesn’t really help you unless you’re near the water. On a local level, especially across a single year, water levels are finite and exhaustible.
Arguably it ends up being a matter of energy use in either case, either to desalinize it or to carry it from afar. That's usually very expensive, though.
Depends on where you live - in North of England and parts of Scotland the water is so plentiful you don't even get a water meter in your home, you only pay a flat delivery charge each year, but are otherwise free to use as much as you like. In which case, I'm happy to use a program that uses loads of water, but obviously in other locations(Cape Town) the amount used should be restricted. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
> Cape Town will likely be out of water by July 15.
The rainy season is starting, and Cape Town is unlikely to run out of water this year. It was touch-and-go until a few months ago, though, and there's still a risk for next year.
No, what “happened” is that detergent mostly isn't made for germ killing and heat even of typical (even older) hot cleaning cycled is insufficient to kill bacteria.
None of this is news.
Of course, people used to use actual (chlorine) bleach with laundry more often, rather than colorsafe “bleach”, and chlorine bleach does kill germs, so that's part of what happened.
It will fade natural fibers, but with 100% synthetic fabrics the dye or pigment is usually mixed into the plastic before it's turned into fibers. In this case the bleach can only affect a very thin surface layer, which causes no visible color change.
All my yard work clothes go through the HE washer twice. Once on quick wash and then again on a regular load to get the dirt out. Running the cycles longer does very little to get out the stains.
Detergent is a surfactant, designed to lift dirt, food and other stains from your clothing to be rinsed away with the water. It does absolutely nothing in terms of bacteria or germs beyond this.
In cases where that's necessary, like hospital linens, a combination of bleach and hot water is used. Most new washing machines now come with a "sanitize" setting that will use a built-in water heater to get to boiling temperatures to clean clothes.
You should also clean your washing machine regularly, using empty cycles and letting it completely dry out. You can't clean much if the cleaning equipment itself is dirty.
"Detergent is a surfactant, designed to lift dirt, food and other stains from your clothing to be rinsed away with the water. It does absolutely nothing in terms of bacteria or germs beyond this."
But it should wash away the bacteria, right?
That's why hospitals advise doctors and patients to wash their hands with soap, isn't it? It's not like they're under any illusion that soap will kill the bacteria/viruses, but just that it should wash them off.
Yes, you're right, but the physics are different. Soap is different than laundry detergent and is designed for your relatively non-porous watertight skin, which when held under a stream of water lets bacteria wash away easily.
Fabric is much more porous and absorbs deeply, along with the trouble of being enclosed in a sealed container. No matter how much soap and water is used, it's unlikely to truly wash away the microscopic bacteria trapped within the fibers.
There are some experimental machines using ultrasound to agitate clothing for removing stains, germs and even the water itself for instant drying, but that's not quite production ready.
I once had a UV steriliser for an aquarium set up, the wattage of bulb needed to be effective was quite expensive and they didn't last all that long either.
UV lights are used to kill pathogens in a number of different settings (some hospitals have super-neat UV robots). The issue is you need direct UV exposure - a pile of clothing in a dryer would largely shield itself.
I am an advocate for energy efficient appliances, but dang it, things got to work.
I have a new dishwasher that takes 3 hours to wash, and I struggle to keep red bacteria from growing all over the place in it. I just did a no-dishes bleach wash this morning. I've never had this problem before.
A few years back I got a new washing machine. After a few weeks of use a light came on that simply said "Hygiene". I had no idea what this meant so looked in the manual. It turns out that the washing machine expects to have a 90 degree C cycle every so often so it kills all the germs inside. This was a feature that my previous machine didn't have.
Semi related. But dr bronner's sal suds is quite nice as a laundry detergent - works better than the regular dr bronners (for laundry). 2 tablespoons is all it takes, smells great, and it should be fine for most people with sensitive skin.
If you're ever forgotten to dry the laundry for just a day or two, you can easily notice what your "clean" laundry starts to emanate. I think that's a simple enough experiment that confirms that "clean" laundry does have LOTS of bacteria, especially before it gets killed by removing the leftover water.
Speaking of bacteria, another interesting at-home experiment is the one with tea. Not everyone knows, but tea is highly anti-bacterial. If you leave an old tea-bag from milk-free green tea lying around with just enough water to keep it moist for a few days or even a week, the chances of spoilage or mold are extremely low — the water will evaporate faster. (I sometimes didn't throw old tea cups from my desk for weeks, and none of them ever developed anything bad, unless they had something other than the tea, e.g., milk tea will develop mold pretty fast.)
Doesn't matter what a thing is (Edit: Except for a green tea bag, apparently?) if you leave it around damp for a couple of days it'll start to smell musty just from airborne bacteria growing on it. If that thing is a warm damp mesh, it's basically the perfect home for bacteria and will start to smell even if it was 100% sterile when it came out of the machine.
This is why I've always been grossed out by shared washing machines. In public laundromats you're soaking your clothes in water that's been used by the whole city. People are washing cloth diapers full of baby poop for all you know.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadThe people exposed to the dirtiest conditions as children are perhaps the least vulnerable in their adult lives. Excessively clean conditions are a problem.
Maybe. But for those of us around immuno-compromised people, this kind of data is good.
Am I going to worry about standard dirty clothes? Meh. Not really.
Am I going to pay more attention when someone is sick and I have to do their laundry? Yes.
She has another article on that:
http://www.stopthestomachflu.com/does-sunlight-kill-germs
A glass window filters out almost all of the UVA spectrum, but you can buy a UVA lamp if you want to disinfect the surface of some item indoors. (DO NOT USE THIS LAMP ON YOURSELF). As an example, The SteriPEN uses a UVA lamp to sterilize water, but needs to be on for a sufficient amount of time as the water is agitated.
edit I'm an idiot, the SteriPEN uses UV-C, which doesn't even get through our atmosphere. UV-A and UV-B do get through and do affect organisms. Here's a paper on the SteriPEN: https://www.travelmedicinejournal.com/article/S1477-8939(15)...
Not that it isn't an accomplishment, but it feels... forced? And not in the way of someone inexperienced with web stuff and proud of their kid.
It has that auto-generated-from-the-previous-contents-of-the-expired-registration domain parking website feel.
Pages go on forever, disorganized navigation, boilerplate explanations duplicated everywhere, very little in the way of charts or tables or summaries, and most of the links about products go to Amazon.
I was baffled she hardly even mentioned the temperature setting, here it is well known that you should run your washer with at least 60C if you want to kill germs.
Do people expect the laundry to actually sanitize clothes? I would think having to option to use cold water is a dead giveaway.
Anyone have a link for a dishwasher test similar to this one?
Always seemed to work just fine, now I'm horrified.
Also, newer detergents contain enzymes which are particularly good at removing biological stains (but do they kill?) In fact, new washing machines also optimize their temperature profile so that they keep the water longer at ~30-40 degrees C, since this is the optimum temperature for enzymes.
Soap creates a colloid with the germs and oils and dirt. Warm water intensifies this effect. All that goes down the drain and becomes somebody else's problem. Which might be good enough most of the time.
Not effective against mold spores, bacteria endospores, worm eggs, higher life forms, really tough bacteria, but soap does kill most bacteria you find in poop
But then what is she culturing on the agar? In the rinse cycle you wouldn’t have much soap left. Maybe something growing on surfaces in the machine? Something that a periodic dose of chlorine kills?
Sanitize fullu no. They (we) do expect it to kill most germs, and kill the odours (which are caused by bacteria in the first place), and clean them.
The best thing about making alternative household products yourself with essential oils is that you at least know exactly what’s in them. If you look at the ingredient list for even a bottle of simple shampoo, there might be dozens of ingredients with names that you could hardly pronounce—whereas with DIY products, there might be five ingredients, all of which you know are safe for your body, your children, your pets, etc."
Yeah, what a bunch of bullshit.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa064725
By the way, the blogger is a PhD in biochemistry. You're not going to win a science battle with her.
Please post a meta analysis from the Cochrane Collab. That's a source that doctors use.
> By the way, the blogger is a PhD in biochemistry. You're not going to win a science battle with her.
Arguments stand on merits. There are plenty of professionals in their respective fields that advocate pseudoscience.
I think essential oils smell good, so I add a drop or two to my homemade cleaners or hair products for example. Not everyone uses them for homeopathy.
EDIT: Here she is hedging her experiment, she seems properly cautious: "I can't be certain if the product is actually killing the bacteria or if it has just somehow stopped the bacteria from growing. I also can't tell how long it takes to kill the bacteria since the product is picked up on the swab and remains with the bacteria on the agar plate during the entire incubation time."
http://www.stopthestomachflu.com/do-essential-oils-like-thie...
I understand authority-crisis, but does this invalidate her other findings? (Can you enjoy Ender's Game even though Orson Scott Card is a fucking weirdo?)
Maybe get this "skeptic radar" checked.
There’s really no recommendation for a specific brand except the norwex+lysol combo, which she wasn’t able to explain why it worked.
Is this a real thing? What's the chemistry behind it?
When it comes to stain removal, Crystal Wash does not work any better than hot water. And, when it comes to some important stains, Crystal Wash often works far worse than laundry detergent.
However a 'bio-ceramic' that is supposed to go in your body hopefully isn't coppery or otherwise biocidal
If it's generating peroxide in situ, it won't kill anything until long after it eats up your clothes and nothing can renewably generate that much peroxide or else it would be used for energy, not advertised on infomercials
The first time you use these products, they appear to work--your clothes actually get pretty clean.
This is because your clothes still have enough embedded detergent in them to still be effective.
After a few washes, the detergent is all gone, and your clothes stop getting clean. But you've seen the product "work", and it's hard to change your mind. Eventually you give up but it's been so long that you don't return the product.
Even apart from the results of this experiment, the basic concept of this product sounds really sketchy to me. I'm not going to say that there's no way at all that mere exposure to sunlight could recharge a catalyst that would change the pH when immersed in water, but just about every pH changing process that I know of involves using up some chemical reagent, and exposure to sunlight alone seems unlikely to replenish that sort of resource. So it sounds like snake oil to me.
Yes, germs are everywhere (surprised?), so what?
First, you can't bleach all you house.
Second, even if you could, why do that? Our body seems to fight nasty stuff pretty well. If you have some specific condition or disease, then just take targeted measures.
>If you have some specific condition or disease, then just take targeted measures
Did you even read the article? That's exactly what she says she is doing. When there's a stomach flu or other harmful bug going through the household, she is using targeted washing methods to rid those germs.
Sorry, but this just seems like OCD disguised by a bit of science.
Then, if you already have stomach flu, then I don't see how bleaching your clothes might help here. Take a medicine.
Finally, reading about stomach flu (I'm not a doctor), it doesn't look like a serious problem: > Most people with the stomach flu require no formal treatment. The key to a rapid and safe recovery at home (home remedy) is proper hydration.
If it gets more serious then take a pill or/and go to a doctor.
imagine a house with small children (who are not good at personal hygiene) as a tiny cruise ship which you can never fully disembark, and then when the cooking/cleaning staff (parents) get sick, things get really ugly.
it's generally easier to clean the hard surfaces in your house (with harsh stuff like bleach wipes) than to clean the soft surfaces. that's presumably why she focuses on the laundry infection vector.
If you are high school student who dont like to go to school, getting sick is fine. If you are anybody else, you want to avoid it even if it does not require formal treatment.
And given there's not "a pill" you can take for it, I don't see how a couple capfulls of bleach is more problematic.
And laundry as a source of transmission is pretty well known in infectious disease epidemiology. One of the biggest issues is not that people get it from clothing, but that the person who handles contaminated clothing is also quite likely to be the person who preps food. Norovirus only needs a very small number of viral particles to make you sick, and a kid sick on either end is shedding a lot of virus.
And while yes, you should, multiple different pathways to reducing your fomite exposure are better than relying on a single point of failure.
"Many people are confused and think that I want to kill all the germs in the world. This is not true. There is good bacteria in our bodies and our environment that is extremely important. I consider myself a "norophobe" and not a "germaphobe". " -- http://www.stopthestomachflu.com/about-the-scientist#TOC-My-....
because in my experience, kids get sick again and again, sometimes it takes a month to get through the cycle
(The only exception I know of is HIV: this virus fools your immune system)
That's why things like that are pushed so heavily.
The problem with washing machines is they are devices that are rather difficult to disinfect. If you were to take a brand new washer, as in never had water ran through it, you would probably see a drastic reduction in her results. However, after a few uses bacteria from the air, cloths, water, and other sources will eventually end up in the system. If the system is not vented, then wet spots will exist throughout each washing cycle carrying with it any bacteria.
With that said, what I am suggesting is the washing machine is the culprit for bacteria from city water, which is not 100% bacteria free. Add in the fact that High-Efficiency washers use substantially less water then older units, and you have a perfect bacterial soup machine. Older machines used more water, which allowed for further dilution and flushing.
Would the situation be the same if the water was 100% free of bacteria with a brand new washer that would be dried completely after each use?
Free of pathogens, maybe. Free of bacteria? Not even a little bit. Especially once it's traveled through household plumbing.
Though germs are a concern, body odor is a very practical reason to always train with clean clothes, and for some people it requires enforcement through peer pressure.
Not all blood pathogens can be killed by traditional disinfectants, even bleach. You need to soak the affected article for 10 minutes with a caustic sterilizer such as Sporicidin or CaviCide (which unlike disinfectants will kill bacterial spores)
No training center I have ever seen cleans their mats this way. Roll at your own risk...
The issue with Staph is that skin-to-skin contact, or the indirect version mediated by a mat, is more than enough for it go to "Yeah, I live here now..."
The open sore is honestly a risk for both - S. aureus loves it some open wounds.
That's just good practice in general, the salt & sweat come out easier when they haven't fully dried yet, and the bacteria won't have as much time to grow their numbers and make the garment permanently smelly.
It would probably be wise for you to increase your washing frequency, nevertheless.
2) also depends on the fabric, but usually you have to be pretty sweaty, at least to the wet-armpits level. Just think of the level where you will be depositing salt on the clothes.
3) Not often.
If you don't want to do laundry right away, you can soak the salty clothes, squeeze them dry, and hang them.
"If you wash a load of just underwear, there will be about 100 million E. coli in the wash water, and they can be transmitted to the next load of laundry," Gerba said.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/washing-machines-load...
"Bacterial Exchange in Household Washing Machines" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4672060/
After decades of doing my own laundry, I'd never heard of that practice. Well, at least not until recently when I got an HE front loader machine, now I run a bleach cleaning cycle once a month or so to kill odor causing germs. But not to keep germs off my clothes.
More than likely, the reason that you perceive an odor is because your body is trying to keep the germs off. So from an evolutionary standpoint, you are probably running a bleach cycle to keep germs off your clothes.
Front load the damned door smacks you in the shin and you close it. Creating a nice little terrarium to grow stuff in.
I throw a little white vinegar into the prewash every time I launder cotton. Keeps the mildew under control and helps with hard water.
Check out the top load HEs. The Japanese were using that design for a long time.
Here is an experiment whose results I'd pay for. Who to fund it; NIH or NSF? They are always asking for the societal impact of the research to be performed.
What does this mean? Where are the odor causing germs if not on your clothes?
Before that..... NEVER DID IT EVER. I had no clue.
So, 130F is just under 60C - what's usually the minimum considered to kill bacteria. While I haven't measured the actual temperature, my aging, second hand washer have three "white" programs: "hot" is 90 C, and there are two rated 60C. I'd never assume any of the other programs had a sterilising effect.
If "hot" is just 60C, and often not that - I can see a need to use bleach for some loads (or other means of killing off bacteria) if the norm is to use warm (not hot) water for washing.
Would be interesting to see similar test with just water (no soap, bleach) and a 90C degree program.
I'd guess the results would be "dotted middleground" like many of the test here.
Also would be nice to see how hanging in the sun would effect otherwise clean clothes (airborne bacteria vs uv death ray stand-off - might be meaningless without checking for type of bacteria).
Your machine has longer and shorter programs, my 60C wash takes about 3 hours by default while a quick was is obviously considerably faster.
If you pull hot water from the heater and circulate it around for 30 min, it's not going to be that hot at the end of the cycle.
But that said, it would not be hard to run 240V to washer, so that can't be the reason.
Do Europeans typically heat water with electricity? That might be the reason - if you are anyway using electricity, you might as well let the washer do it.
In the US natural gas water heaters are very common (it's more efficient). And natural gas dryers too.
Modern front-loading washing machines, especially those managing an A or better on the EC's energy rating system, tend to use very little water, though. Depending on the plumbing system, by the time the potential cold water in the hot water pipes had run through, you might not get very much hot water at all before you were done, so you'd have to heat electrically anyway.
Don't do that. You risk legionnaires disease. Set the temperature to at least 140F.
I have a tankless water heater, though. The water won't be at 140F for very long, so I can't imagine it actually killing very much bacteria.
How does water heater temperature below 140F increase the risk of getting legionnaires disease?
Also, I always wash my clothes on warm, never on hot, because I don't want my clothes to shrink.
Many clothes manufacturers also label the clothes they make with directions saying to only wash on warm or cold. Otherwise, presumably, the clothes might get damaged.
At 140F or above it's killed. Around 100F it thrives. It's one of the rare bacteria that do well in hot water, and is naturally found in our water supply (as opposed to exotic locales).
120F is the max recommended hot water temperature in the International Plumbing Code.
And not at the dishwasher or washing machine.
> Far more people get scalded by tap/shower water that is too hot than contract legionnaires by several orders of magnitude.
First of all virtually no one actually sets their tank at 120F.
Second:
"It is estimated that Legionnaires' disease is the cause of between two and nine percent of pneumonia cases that are acquired outside of hospital." [1]
"There are an estimated 8,000 to 18,000 cases a year in the United States that require hospitalization for legionnaires" [1]
"11,028 scald burns in children younger than 3 years old annually." [2]
"8,620 visits per year among Adults Aged ≥65 Years" [3]
I don't have numbers for the full population, but your "several orders of magnitude" is clearly quite off. At best it's a single order of magnitude - and that's only because almost no one actually sets the temperature so low.
If they did the number would swing.
And don't forget the pneumonia rates. This is not some rare unheard of disease.
[1] doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(15)60078-2.
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276065254_Scald_bur...
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5836a1.htm
http://www.stopthestomachflu.com/does-sunlight-kill-germs
With bleach you have to make sure you add it to the water at the right time which a malfunctioning dispenser can fail to do (and you might not realize it), but apart from that it works reliably and even with cold water. A "sanitize" setting can get similar results but it depends on the machine; her neighbor's didn't work as well as hers. Unfortunately non-chlorine bleach and "sanitizer" additives do not reliably sanitize.
The obsessiveness of the post can given the impression that this is someone who's a germaphobe, but she actually notes that it's not necessary to kill germs most of the time. She's just motivated to figure out how to effectively sanitize in the cases where you want to do it, like a household illness or cloths used to wipe up raw chicken.
For example, Clorox recommends using 1/2 cup of Clorox regular bleach in laundry. That's 8 tablespoons worth. That's on the low end of what the CDC recommends per gallon of water for disinfecting something that's contaminated with Norovirus (a viral stomach bug especially common in the winter).
Norovirus is also pretty heat stable, though the sanitize setting should get hot enough, though it's not clear if its hot enough for long enough.
In my experience the newer energy efficent washers/dryers are almost total garbage compared to the older ones. I would love to see this experiment repeated with an older 90's kenmore or whirlpool or really any brand from the 90's or before.
I love the idea of saving energy, and energy efficient laundry sounds like a great idea on the surface, but what I think happened was the government put regulations in place without really considering the actual impact this would have on the quality of the washers/dryers.
Front-loaders are vastly different between the North American market and Europe or Korea. I remember my friend's brand new LG in California would run an eco-friendly cycle in 40 minutes. A similar model in Europe takes 4h30!
That's not true of modern front-load washers. At my old (UK) flat we had an old Beko front-loading clunker. It worked perfectly well but was very noisy and took a long time (not 4 hours though! maybe 1.5 - 2 hours).
At my current place we have a much more modern one where a fast/economy cycle takes 36 minutes. It's nice and quiet too.
Edit: here's an example: http://www.lg.com/uk/washing-machines/lg-FH4A8TDN2#
- 60°C full load 297 minutes
- 60°C partial load 244 minutes
- 40°C partial load 239 minutes
I have no idea why it does that.
I have no idea what the difference between the cotton and the mixed load settings is, but I usually do the shorter cycle if I have a lot of loads to do.
I guess if you're setting it running in the morning and then heading out for the day, 4-5 hours isn't a problem. But often I end up doing all the laundry on one day: clothes as well as towels, bed sheets, etc, in multiple loads, and don't want to be waiting around too long for each load to finish...
Slow wash cycles are more efficient. Loosening the dirt by soaking means that less agitation is required. Manufacturers cheat the mandatory efficiency tests by making the default cycle very slow, but offering faster cycle settings. My washing machine takes nearly four hours for a standard cotton cycle, but has a "speed perfect" button that reduces the wash time to under an hour. I always use the fast setting.
It is, perhaps, a little deceptive if people believe their machines are more efficient than they really are on the commonly used cycles.
The way to solve this would be to improve the efficiency tests so that they test the efficiency of a fast cycle as well as an economy/long cycle.
And for the comparison to be correct you need to compare an eco mode quick wash - normally a light load.
I'm trying to. The standardized annual power consumption that is advertised on the energy rating is only accurate if you use the default settings for 40 and 60°C cotton cycles. And that is effectively 4 hours at 40°C for a partial load. I saw the advertised "turbowash" cycle, however while it's supposed to be energy efficient, you have to take LG's word for it.
In the US, while models differ in size, if you look at a similar price range and load capacity, you'll see that numbers used for the energy rating are pretty similar (around 100 kWh or less). But, to my knowledge, the default cycles are fairly short. Sadly neither Samsung nor LG seem to publish cycle length in their manuals.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...
If anyone is looking for ideas on how to make the world a better place, look into figuring out how to shift the culture so that air drying becomes more common. Also composting toilets.
Edit: Drying clothes uses 56 billion kWh of energy in the US.[1] Another related area that needs work is standby power.[2]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=96&t=3
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/science/just-how-much-pow...
Socially, improving commuting infrastructure so people waste less gas would easily have a larger benefit and you are not going to fight nearly as hard.
Etc etc, this might be top 50 but it's not a top 10 and it's hard.
People waste so much energy without thinking about it and for reasons that aren't particularly more convenient, like using disposable dishware instead of just rinsing off your plate when you're done. I look around at my peers even here in Mexico and see a shift, like asking for no straw when ordering a michelada.
So focusing on the specific energy usage of dryers begins to sound near-sighted. Nobody suggested that dryers alone cause all waste.
PS: For manufactured products cost is often a reasonable first approximation of environmental impact. When you get 300 paper plates for 2 cents each they really can't take many resources to manufacture. Further, by ending up in a landfill they actually act as a carbon sink.
Washing a few dishes by hand just takes a moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/23/children-all...
https://www.webmd.com/allergies/news/20150223/could-a-dishwa...
These cycles take longer. AIUI it's to compensate for reduced temperature (saving the bulk of the energy) and reduced water usage.
Though there might be an element of misuse. My machine warns in the manual to do a 60or 90 degree wash with no clothes every couple of months to clean the machine. I suspect most people don’t do this.
As for the driers, if your coloured clothes have that whitish undertone that suggests they've been through a good drying in your drier, then I think you're doing it wrong. I was so disappointed how much my clothes would wear out in the American driers that I'd always make sure to only use them on the lowest setting possible, even for jeans and such. Definitely not missing any old non-HE driers; you're not really supposed to kill the bacteria with the heat of the drying anyways, and using hot water is much more efficient for that.
My washer is sitting next to the kitchen sink and I just manually add a huge load of water every time I turn that damn thing on. I installed a faucet with a hose just for that reason.
Most of the washing machine purchasing decisions must be based on the marketing fluff. I don't think there are many publications even on EU level which run and publish comprehensive tests for these machines. Without such objective tests, it is pretty much impossible to base the purchasing decision on hard facts (except those mandated to be reported by EU).
I remember reading that some washing machines actually did not even obey the request to use high temperatures, because the manufacturer had noticed that they can match the EU target for wash efficiency also with lower temperatures. Can't find any reference for this, so take this with a grain of salt.
[1] http://www.topten.eu/uploads/File/130904_Topten_recommendati...
Cape Town will likely be out of water by July 15.
High efficiency dryers and washers have their place; just maybe not where water is prevalent.
The lack of water meters is a legacy thing. Water companies all over the UK (including the North) are trying to migrate consumers away from unmetered tariffs. For example: https://www.nwl.co.uk/your-home/your-account/considering-a-w...
And in case you think the water companies are just as happy if you're on an unmetered tariff: https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/water-m...
The rainy season is starting, and Cape Town is unlikely to run out of water this year. It was touch-and-go until a few months ago, though, and there's still a risk for next year.
None of this is news.
Of course, people used to use actual (chlorine) bleach with laundry more often, rather than colorsafe “bleach”, and chlorine bleach does kill germs, so that's part of what happened.
I've been trying to just use vinegar. Hope it helps.
In cases where that's necessary, like hospital linens, a combination of bleach and hot water is used. Most new washing machines now come with a "sanitize" setting that will use a built-in water heater to get to boiling temperatures to clean clothes.
You should also clean your washing machine regularly, using empty cycles and letting it completely dry out. You can't clean much if the cleaning equipment itself is dirty.
But it should wash away the bacteria, right?
That's why hospitals advise doctors and patients to wash their hands with soap, isn't it? It's not like they're under any illusion that soap will kill the bacteria/viruses, but just that it should wash them off.
Fabric is much more porous and absorbs deeply, along with the trouble of being enclosed in a sealed container. No matter how much soap and water is used, it's unlikely to truly wash away the microscopic bacteria trapped within the fibers.
There are some experimental machines using ultrasound to agitate clothing for removing stains, germs and even the water itself for instant drying, but that's not quite production ready.
I wonder if anyone makes a dryer with embedded UV lights, that'd be interesting.
I have a new dishwasher that takes 3 hours to wash, and I struggle to keep red bacteria from growing all over the place in it. I just did a no-dishes bleach wash this morning. I've never had this problem before.
Speaking of bacteria, another interesting at-home experiment is the one with tea. Not everyone knows, but tea is highly anti-bacterial. If you leave an old tea-bag from milk-free green tea lying around with just enough water to keep it moist for a few days or even a week, the chances of spoilage or mold are extremely low — the water will evaporate faster. (I sometimes didn't throw old tea cups from my desk for weeks, and none of them ever developed anything bad, unless they had something other than the tea, e.g., milk tea will develop mold pretty fast.)