Do folks in Europe use the same detergent in top loaders (e.g. twin tub) as for front loader?

[passatdoc]

As most of you know if you read this board, front loaders now constitute a majority of washers currently sold in the USA, but if you count washers <span style="text-decoration: underline;">still in use</span> around the country, top loaders still are a majority. Since TL use 2-3 times as much water as a FL, we have a dual population of laundry detergent here:

 

conventional: higher sudsing, intended for use in a large volume of water

 

HE (High Efficiency): low sudsing, intended for use in a small volume of water, supposedly able to keep dirt/oil in suspension and allow it to rinse out of the clothes.

 

Whether US HE products work as well as European products (e.g. Persil or Ariel) is open to debate---I think that US products such as Tide HE or Gain HE work fairly well, but not as well as Euro products. Not surprising, given that front loaders have been in widespread use in Europe for far longer.  Launderess and others have posted here in the past with questions as to how reformulated the US HE products really are. Are they totally reformulated, or did they just add an anti-sudsing agent?

 

I see the difference enough to make it a point to bring back detergent from European trips (last trip to UK in May resulted in a haul of four boxes of Ariel bio w/Actilift, Sainsburys didn't have Persil bio on the shelves so I went with Persil). When shopping in the US, products approved by appliance makers for low water use machines are identified by a blue oval "HE" icon, though I question whether it's copyrighted, as I've seen detergent in Costco bearing the icon and the box says "for both front and top loading machines".  (um, don't think so).

 

So my question is-----at one time, people in the UK used a lot of twin tub machines which were essentially top loaders with respect to water use (tub filled with water and clothes propelled by center agitator or a side wall agitator e.g. Hoover). Was there different detergent formulations in, say, the 1960s and 70s when both twin tubs and FLs were common in the UK? Or did they make do with the same formula and just vary the amount used?

 

Reason I ask: my cabin bag was selected for additional screening at Heathrow Terminal 3 security, due to all the electronic toys (chargers for netbook; camera and chargers; two phones and chargers, etc.) They basically unpack the bag and look through everything. I had one box of Ariel in a gallon-size ZipLock bag and he asked why someone was bringing detergent to USA. I explained that the quality of US detergent for FL lags behind European standards, in part because a majority of the washers here are still TL. He seemed amazed that two versions of each brand--HE and regular-- are sold in the US).  Of course, I'd guess that twin tub machines today in the UK are mostly in the hands of aficionados and that the average Brit uses a modern FL, so the market today in the UK for a TL formula would be rather sparse.

 

[whirlpolf]

my 2 ct to it.

hi Jim.
Strange phenomenon being checked by the security for having detergent in your baggage LOL ;-)
Reminds me of being checked for weed when crossing the Netherlands' border for having "vla" in my baggage (the Dutch produce this wonderful custard called "vla" and I am so addicted! No weed, just vla. My long hair apparently gave them a wrong hint *giggle* - hooked on dairy products, apparently.)

Seriously:
The only market I can speak for is the German one. Yes, for years and years and years there have only been the regular compact powders around, the ones for frontloaders. Reason: Our toploaders work the same way as the frontloaders do (low puddle of water, tumble action).

Timeline:
1930-40 (roughly): Manual "boilwashing" in a kettle, scrubbing on the washboard, rinsing in tubs. Soaps were used, sometimes "Persil" (perborate plus silicates, hence the name). Sometimes wash blueing for the whites.

40s-50s: First rotating impeller machines were sold, high sudsing detergents came up. Some mono and twin tub machines had oscillating agitators (Miele), but that was a minority and they were comparably expensive.

Late 50s to 60s: Automatics (drum type machines) came up and flooded the market. High water volume (impeller or agitator) toploader vanished in no time and high-sudsing went away as well, everyone wanted an automatic (there were no automatic toploaders back then, all had to be operated manually).

Late 60s to 70s: Almost all machines were drum type now and automatic. No more need for high-sudsing detergents. Phosphates were in them for better cleaning. "bio" came up (meaning: biological wash action, containing enzymes to break up organic dirt). Now "bio" being the new trend, phosphates went.

80s - 90s: Saving resources was the new thing (having learnt from the oil crisis in the 70s):
First drum-type machines with water saving features, first detergents in "compact" size (no more huge powder buckets but just small packages). The pitch was: "why have fillers in them to pollute the rivers? just pure cleaning agents".

90s to now: Saving water (low consumption drum-type machines, both top and front loading), saving energy (lower temperatures as heating eats up most of your watts), saving chemistry (no filler detergents, almost everything is compact now, small packages). Added to the chorus: The liquids (low temps = bad dissolving of powder, so liquids will dilute instantaneously). "Eco" (ecological) was the new creed.

Since 2000: It has shown that cold washes and cool washes do not completely get rid of "the stink" (aerobics and gyms coming up here since the late 80s), so your lycra washables require "extra hygienic" rinses or disinfectant additives, that is what they tell us. "Eco" is now often called "bio" (not meaning enzymes, but meaning "going green" - this new bio lable was taken from the vegetable and food market, meaning "organic" or "green")

Chemistry as it is now:
Regular detergents here are usually formulated to act this way:
1. dilute as fast as they can, detergents removing dirt right from the beginning and keeping it in suspension. (imitating old soap)
2. while heating occurs, in the warm to hot phase: Enzymes should do their work and break proteins and organic dirt.
3. when (and if selected) going from warm to hot or even boiling: Oxygen action bleaching agents and grease removers said to counteract spots and stains (they work best when hot) - chlorine is usually not used, even avoided as most of the knowledgable housewives have had the experience in the 60s that it might lead to yellowing on the long run or that it weakens cotton (Punks DO however use chlorine on purpose), while simultaneously anti-lime agents (decalcifiers, mostly precipitating ones) working against water hardness (the more heat is applied).
4. Finally, the whole process must a) keep ALL the different dirts off the fabric and in suspension and b) be as NON-foaming as can be to be rinsed out with lesser rinse cycles and with lesser rinse water.

Wrapping it up I might just GUESS (without really knowing) that Euro detergents are ALMOST the same as HE products, only one difference: Ours are typically designed to work in self-heating washers, yours might possibly be formulated to be best in low water level drum type machines that fill warm right from the start of the cycle. The rest might possibly be the same.

 

[ozzie908]

Automatic powder

We have 2 types of powder the majority of it now is just classed as regular powder and hand wash and twin tub being the minority which is high sudsing I remember when Persil was called just that and with the onslaught of Drum autos it was renamed Persil Automatic etc

Austin

 

[whirlpolf]

oh, and this is when high-sudsing detergents went away

The dear and much adored "Clementine" character, the actress of which has died - she shows us the latest still available high-sudsing detergents of Germany back then (that is when I went from child to teenager *yawn*).
Her dubbed international versions of the commercial are not very liked, I know, but the German originals are so typical, so original and so "I am your knowledgeable neighbor" here to help you. She is an icon and will be missed by thousands. (I agree, the translations are more than sloppily done, no more helping spirit in them, she was so "hey pal!" yet in the translations she is just "bla, come on...")
"Clementine" was a real friend, even when being an imagined character.

 

[ronhic]

In Oz...

...we have both...

 

They are either labeled 'HE' or 'Front Load' or both.....and 'Top Load'..

 

You can, of course, use a 'HE' detergent in a traditional top load machine...you just need to use at least 3 times as much due to the water volume to ensure a certain concentration of detergent.

 

[mrboilwash]

Back in the late 1980s after the fall of the Berlin wall Henkel detergent boxes suddenly advised to use the same measures of powder for high water volume impeller machines as for "normal" automatic machines. (According to water hardness and soil level)
I think the higher dilution was made up with lower capacity of the GDR Wellenrad machines.
Guess the total amount of soiled laundry is more important than the water volume.

How are dosing instruction in the States if a detergent is labeled for both HE and traditional machines ? Do you have to double the dose for toploaders due to high water volume ?

 

[passatdoc]

@whirlpolf: it's quite possible that US HE detergents are formulated differently, to work with warm or hot water at the start of the wash cycle (water enters at proper selected temperature thanks to hot/cold fill and automatic temperature control). On the other hand, more and more FLs have a pre-wash option, and presumably most people would use the same detergent for prewash and wash, even though prewash might be a cool water "soak" first.

 

PS Clementine was a rip-off of Josephine The Plumber ads, for Comet kitchen cleanser, which began in the early 1960s. I first saw Clementine on German tv in 1973 as an exchange student living in Holland (close enough to the border to receive one German channel). At the time, I thought "how can they get away with stealing such an obvious idea, Josephine The Plumber?" but now I know that both Comet and Ariel belong to Proctor and Gamble---if they wanted to steal their own idea from the US and bring it to Germany, they were free to do so, plus few if any German viewers had ever seen live American television (not the programs, but the actual ads). Here are links to color ads for Josephine, but I remember when it was in black and white. She had the same white overalls with her name embroidered on them, just like Clementine.


   (this ad is probably late 1960s or early 1970s, but she began early 1960s)

 

@ozzie908 and ronhic: ok, then at one point there were two varieties of detergent, one for twin tubs (basically, miniatures of US toploaders without a spin cycle built into the wash tub) and one for drum FLs. Which is what we have now in USA, with a majority of sales being FLs, but a majority of machines still in service being TLs. It's not uncommon for vintage Maytag TLs to last 30-40 years. My sister has a 1993 Maytag that has never had a repair.

 

Come to think of it, when visiting in Oz, I've noticed both TLs and FLs in people's homes, so they'd probably have to sell both types of detergent, as they do in USA. I would imagine that with the reality of water conservation down under, FLs must be leading the sales now.

 

@mrboilwash: the only package I've seen with my own eyes that said "for FL and for TL" was Kirkland brand (Costco) detergent. The dose was higher for TL. It had the blue oval "HE" icon, but I wonder if it's trademarked or whether anyone can use it.  I understand that some of the detergent Sears sells is also marked as for both TL and FL (doesn't make sense to me). 

 

Manufacturers like Tide make both versions. The regular formula does not say it can be used in FL, and the HE formula does not recommend use in a TL:


http://www.tide.com/en-US/categories/powders.jspx

 

The website seems to be quite clear that you buy traditional for TL, HE for FL, and that they are not interchangeable.

 

Since Tide HE powder is readily available (and so is Gain HE to a lesser degree, also a P&G product), I buy it when it's on sale and that is my "daily" detergent. I use Euro detergent for my work (office casual) clothes. For sturdy cottons, towels, and linens, I use Tide or Gain HE powder. They work fairly well, but not quite as well as Persil or Ariel. (Da weiß man, was man hat....).

 

[MrX]

In the UK and Ireland the term "Automatic" was used to indicate low-sud powder from the 1950s through to the 1980s.

By the end of the 1970s there weren't really any non-automatic products, other than those specifically for hand-washing, but the "automatic" tag line clung on.

By the 1990s it had dropped completely and it's basically assumed that any laundry product is "automatic" (HE) unless stated otherwise.

There is still a very niche market in this country for top-loader US-style agitator machines and you can buy several models of Whirlpool / Maytag top loaders which are just 230V 50Hz versions of US machines pretty much.

If you're using a machine like that, you just use a larger dose of the same low-foaming powder that you'd use in a front loader.

 

[rolls_rapide]

Powder formulation

The powders of the 1970s and 80s used phosphates, as you know. The "Automatic" front-loader versions were designed to be low-foaming, yet still contained phosphates.

The 1990s saw the rise of zeolite as a green substitute for phosphates, and this was included in the "Automatic" versions, but not in the twin-tub version. Why? I think the answer is in the way the machines rinse.

A front-loader flops and drops clothes through the rinse water, basically allowing the fabric to flex as it does so. Intermediate spins between rinses satisfactorily get rid of the cloudy, zeolite laden rinse water.

A twin-tub relying on the "spin-a-rinse" action, does not allow the fabric to flex, since the laundry is crammed into the spinner drum. Zeolites would leave very noticable chalky marks, so phosphates were the chief ingredient in twin-tub soap powders. Phosphates rinsed cleanly, you see - or rather you don't see, since there was no residue!

 

[twinniefan]

How coincidental

Coincidental indeed that this topic has appeared in a thread, just today,due to being home sick with bad dose of flu did a load of washing while brother and sister were out shopping, did this load in the twin tub using the Supreme frangipanni fragrance F.L. formula, used 1/4 cup for about 5 kg load, and it did seem to make a fair bit of foam which did not really disappear when clothes were added, here are some pics I took of it.
Bear in mind the Supreme brand of detergent is a fairly cheap type of brand found mostly in discount variety stores, did not really perform all that well on food stains on shirts, had to soak and then re-wash in Maximat which did the trick, although the Supreme was ok for the other things which were not stained to any extent.
Enjoy the pics.

 

[twinniefan]

Pic no.2

pic no.2

 

[twinniefan]

pic no. 3

pic no. 3

 

[twinniefan]

pic no. 4

pic no. 4

 

[twinniefan]

last pic

last pic no. 5

 

[twinniefan]

sorry this is last pic

sorry this is last pic another of the detergent

 

[jetcone]

I was wondering about this very thing recently

And so I calculated the amount of surfactant you got in a dose of Tide HE and a dose of 1957 Cheer. Cheer was measured as One Cup for a regular top loader wash load. One cup weighed 85 grams. Come to measure One Dose of Tide He today and it comes up as 85 grams! So It would seem He detergents are just more compact. Both formulas called for 15-20% by weight of surfactant to the whole formula. So you were getting the same amount of surfactant per load in 1957 as you are today. And HE detergents cost more.

 

That opened my eyes.

 

[hoovermatic]

When I was at college and used a twin tub and at various other times throughout my life when I have used them I invariably used low suds powder simply because I found that high suds versions like Daz and Ariel etc are so sudsy that one can't seem to get rid of it, particularly if you are using a machine like a Hoovermatic, which whips up suds by the bucket load. As a child, my mother often used Persil which she referred to as 'soap powder'. The start of the wash, when the water was hottest was always quite sudsy but not excessively so and as the wash progressed with successive loads and cooling water, the water seemed to be sort of 'milky' and much less sudsy.

Was the Persil of the early 1970's a synthetic detergent or more of a 'soap powder' as a lot of people assumed?

 

[passatdoc]

Whilst in London recently, I bought a small box of Ariel Actilift (bio) to launder some socks in the hotel bathroom sink. I was amazed how sudsy it was (considering it's an "automatic" or HE-equivalent formula) but my guess is I probably used way too much. I didn't have a measuring device so I just poured what looked like 15 ml into my hand and dumped it into the sink.

 

On a later trip to Sainsburys, I bought three more boxes ("10 wash" size but they last for months since I use only 30-45ml per load) of Ariel to bring home. The only Persil I could find was non-bio (?for cold water washing?) so I didn't buy any. The 10 wash size, about 3.50 pounds in price, fits neatly inside a gallon size ZipLock bag, providing extra protection should the carton break en route. I used a soft sided duffel bag as my checked luggage, and have had a box Via/Unilever break in my luggage in the past...messy!. The larger sizes are more economical but harder to pack securely if using a duffel bag.

 

[launderess]

@hoovermatic

Persil has always been a detergent, aside from small amounts of soap added to various formulas.

The decrease in foam with sucessive wash loads probably had more to do with reduced ratios of surfactants to soils as more and more dirt was taken up by the wash water. Years ago washing up liquids would have television adverts showing how powerful they were by how much a housewive could wash and still have tons of froth left. One was taught at an early age that when the froth died down during dishwashing it was either time to add more product, or dump the water and start fresh.

As for the "milky" appearance of wash water, that could have been the result of whatever chemicals were used for water softening (soap, silicates, washing soda, etc),along with above mentioned surfactants.