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> 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 t
by jwilk 8y ago
> 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?
- JTbane 8y agoSeems like snake oil.
- facetube 8y agohttp://laundry.reviewed.com/features/crystal-wash-tested-does-this-detergent-alternative-actually-work http://laundry.reviewed.com/features/crystal-wash-tested-doe...
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoI 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
- IvyMike 8y agoIn 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.
- mtgx 8y agoCouldn't you achieve something similar with vinegar in the pre-wash?
- Steuard 8y agoThe 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.
- AdrianB1 8y agoRead between the lines: there is no effect on germs from detergents or Crystal wash. Zero equals zero :)
- Steuard 8y agoThat 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. :) )