In the old days, laundry detergent came in big, heavy boxes, which bagboys had to heave into your car, and husbands or teenage sons would have the chore of lugging the cumbersome container into your laundry room. Sometimes actual plastic cups would be buried inside the soap flakes for the lucky clothes cleaner to dig out. Other times, one would just use her/his own glass-measuring cup straight out of the kitchen cupboard. How much to use depended upon the particular brand of laundry detergent and how dirty the clothes were. Today the bottles of laundry soap are smaller and lighter and probably liquid. But the same rules back then still apply today. You can save money by using your favorite laundry detergent correctly.
Laundry detergent has lost lots of its bulk and weight by being concentrated. A little bit of laundry soap goes a long way. Every new bottle of liquid and box of dry laundry powder has directions printed on back of the container. It is important to read and understand those directions. If you switch brands of laundry detergent then you will need to study the directions on the new container.
Modern liquid laundry soap is measured by using the bottle’s cap as a measuring cup. The bottle cap will have lines or marks for measurement on the inside or outside of the bottle cap. In some bottle caps the measuring lines are extremely hard to see even in good lighting. Its important that you take the time to get to know exactly how much laundry detergent to use for a given load size and for how dirty the load may be. Just because you use half a cap full of soap of your old laundry detergent per load doesn’t mean those old measurements apply to your new laundry soap. Your new brand might require a full cap or only a quarter of a cap full.
Part of children’s chores may include doing their own laundry once they reach a certain age. Washing and drying clothes using modern appliances isn’t like breaking rocks in the hot sun with a sledgehammer. But children must be taught how to use the correct amount of laundry detergent for the size of their load of clothes and its degree of dirtiness. Some elderly people just fill up the cap and dump it into the washing machine just like teenagers sometimes do. Why throw money down the drain by using more laundry soap than is necessary?
It’s not the company who makes your laundry detergents fault if you use too much of their product washing clothes in a washing machine. They may make it difficult to accurately measure their product by not using easily distinguishable, multicolored marks on/in their measuring caps, but they do include directions on every container they sell. If the laundry detergent bottle says you can get forty-four loads of average size, mildly dirty clothes then that are how many loads you should be getting from a bottle. If you want to save money by using your favorite laundry detergent then you must follow the directions correctly.
