Is your laundry green? It should be. Not green as in the color of grass. But green as in good for the environment. In this week's Family First, it's easy to be gentle on the environment in the laundry room. And your clothes will come out just as clean.
USI student Mitchell Wolfe agreed to help us with our test. He's washing two loads of laundry. One in hot water, the other in cold. Clayton's Laundry and Dry Cleaning owner Steve Schmitt says you can save the environment and money in the laundry. He says the first step is to switch from hot to cold water for all your wash. Next, a front-loading washer requires one-third the water, detergent, and power, of a top-loader. And because front-loaders spin at higher r-p-ms, the clothes come out needing much less time in the dryer. Now just eliminate your chlorine bleach for the non-chlorine variety and you're good to go. And back to our test. Does cold water work as well at hot in getting our clothes clean?
"The cold water seems to be a lot whiter, a lot more clean than the hot water so just initially it looks like the cold water did a little bit more work than the hot water did for us."
Mitchell thought the cold water actually worked better, but that could have been the difference in fabrics. In most cases, cold water won't work better, but just as well as hot water.