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Thanks for your kind and detailed reply! I didn’t really mean “immediately” so much as “you can’t leave it overnight then possibly forget about it the next mor
by ComputerGuru 3y ago
Thanks for your kind and detailed reply!
I didn’t really mean “immediately” so much as “you can’t leave it overnight then possibly forget about it the next morning,” but yeah, it seems to depend on the weather and other things (more on that below). Hasn’t happened in a while. The washing machine is clean, I scrub out the mold in the detergent tray regularly and have always left the door open. I used to run the cleaning cycle from time to time but don’t think it is necessary since I do whites with plenty bleach at scalding hot temps often enough. It happened with our old top loader, too. More than anything though, you can smell a moldy washer and ours doesn’t smell and a freshly washed load normally doesn’t either.
It seems to be the Lake Michigan water we are hooked up to responsible for the stinky occasions. I read up about this a few years ago and they actually monitor for the levels of the molecule (I don’t think it was bacteria?) that gives wet clothes their stink since it is rampant in the Great Lakes and they are constantly adjusting because it’s expensive to counteract more than they feel they need to. My guess is that they got their act together in recent years. Another point in this direction is that it happens some summers to towels used after a shower while they’re hanging to dry. I’m pretty sure it’s just the water.
Oh, and in answer to your question, we definitely noticed the euro-style front-loader was harder on the clothes than the old American top-loader – though it also did get more stains out. But yes, we too fill it up properly to capacity to avoid the waste of running it empty or mostly so - and I guess the increased friction would contribute.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoI found the link I had archived three years ago (when I mentioned researching this some years back): a Chicago Tribune article from 1994 [0]! There are lots of other search results that discuss the byproducts of various algal blooms contributing to a particular stink in Lake Michigan water, some mention the active carbon filtration and another [1], the use of ozone to neutralize the responsible compounds, but only the 1994 article actually names the responsible compounds: geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol (2-MIB). (I remembered geosmin – the sometimes nice, sometimes not, smell of the earth after a rain – while writing my reply yesterday but could not recall the second compound for the life of me and I knew/know geosmin wasn’t solely responsible for the smell on its own.) [0]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-11-20-9411200261-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-11-20-941120... archived at https://archive.ph/qV723# https://archive.ph/qV723# [1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-06-25-9906250245-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-06-25-990625... just archived at https://archive.ph/wip/ybQ9N https://archive.ph/wip/ybQ9N —- There’s also this 53-page survey of contributors to taste and smell in water supplies from the Illinois State Water Survey out of UIUC that I would love to get around to reading (or at least skimming through): https://www.isws.illinois.edu/pubdoc/C/ISWSC-127.pdf https://www.isws.illinois.edu/pubdoc/C/ISWSC-127.pdf