Gabriele
Ok, Brazil is a Tropical country, but not everywhere is hot here.
In my city the weather is almost pyrolitic as everybody here is tired or hearing it from me.
But in some other regions it's much colder, and water temperatures is also colder.
For example in southern cities like Gramado or Porto Alegre, the temperature during the summer is usually 28/32C, during the winter it easily reach -15C. In Gramado they have lots of snow for more than a month per year.
Even there, people do cold washes only.
Of course the Sinner's Circle has a limit, but there should be an equation to balance the chemicals, mechanical action and time with the temperature.
More detergent maybe? Or maybe that's the reason why brazilians love to soak.
Again, the most popular aditives here are laundry powder (Omo Multi Acão is the best seller), bleach for whites (nothing else for colors) and for the specific stains, the famous musical band soap bar, laundry sink & elbow grease with the hit parade "please don't stop the rubbing".
If you enter any ordinary laundry room in Brazil, (considering "normal" people, not laundrylovers like us) you'll find a washing machine, a laundry sink, and usually 3 or more buckets used to let clothes soaking.
Off topic: the favorite bucket in brazil can't be bought in stores LOL. People love to use old 10kg HTH (Pool treatment powder) buckets. Well, the bucket is really strong and too good to be disposed after the HTH ends so, everybody that has swimming pools keep the buckets. when they have enough, they start giving them to neighbors, relatives and friends. and that bucket is so good that it lasts for more than 10 years. (i had one for more than 20 years, when HTH was still made by Olin. It cracked only last year.
As chlorine looses it's effect after some time, it's safe to use after the bucket is very well rinsed. Also, it's used to soak clothes, not to store food, so I agree there's no reason to simply dispose so well made buckets and then spend money buying poor quality buckets that won't last more than a year.
This HTH bucket thing is so famous that years ago, on pool supply stores there were banners and leaflets asking people to give the old buckets to friends as an alternative to reducee plastic waste and help the environment. If all your friends already had those buckets, you could return them to the stores so other people could get it for free.
Lots of other products use exactly the same bucket, from paints to commercial size butter or soy oil for restaurants and even other brands of pool chlorine, but for some reason, only the HTH bucket is kept. Funny, isn't it? It's also a good marketing tool because the HTH brand is somehow, everywhere, even on houses without swimming pools. and when we talk about chlorine for swimming pools, of course the first brand in our minds is HTH.