Sanitizing Laundry Without Chlorine Bleach

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DO NOT USE THIS ONE

The old fashioned original formula Dettol, i.e. the one that smells like hospitals and turns water milky white is absolutely not suitable for use in a washing machine. It will make your machine smell horrible for months after use and should never be used for doing laundry.

This is also the one that is not recommended around cats.

DO NOT USE IN A WASHING MACHINE EVER :

mrx++5-9-2010-15-44-43.jpg
 
Comparison of ingredients:

Lavender Liquid Dettol :

Aqua
Propylene Glycol
Isopropyl alcohol
Benzalkonium Chloride
Disodium EDTA
Parfum
Hexyl Cinnamal
Citronellol
Benzyl Salicylate
Linalool

The version that is used for cleaning wounds etc is NOT the one to use!

Antiseptic "Classic" version:

Active substance
Chloroxylenol 4.8% w/v
Excipients: Castor Oil Soap 14.0 – 15.2% v/v

Pine oil,
Isopropyl alcohol,
Castor oil soap
Caramel
Water.

Full details below:

 
Prewash?

I was always taught one has to remove soil BEFORE disinfecting. The soils will cancel out the disinfectant before it has chance to do its job.

Wash in detergent first with complete sets of rinses then a quick wash in disinfectant.

You also say about not using the original one in the machine for the lingering smell. I actually rather like the smell of it. Often buy some to pour into my bathwater especially in the summer months after a hard days gardening or doing jobs.

So what if the scent lingers, if you like it it wont bother or harm you to use it in the machine on things its safe for.

Saying that im also keen on Wrights Coal Tar soap and use that often enough. Just because you dont like the smell dosnt mean others dont.
 
Benzalkonium Chloride

Is a quat compound similar to what is in Miele Hygiene and other laundry rinses/fabric softeners that claim to sanitise wash.

Quats are preferred over phenol for laundry because they do not have that carbolic scent, which is the hallmark of phenol. Indeed quats do not have a scent at all, which makes them good for laundry products because they do not bring anything to the party that might conflict with another perfume.

Quats are also used to preserve a wide variety of consumer products from shampoos to body washes to face creams, and so forth from spoiling.
 
The Standard Dettol bottle here suggests adding to rinse water to disinfect, I havent found the smell to linger, I'll occaisionally add a couple of capfulls.

The smell doesnt bother me, I had half a capful to my shaving water each day and wash my face in the stuff.
 
The soils won't cancel the effect of the disinfectant. It kills bacteria and viruses regardless of the soil on the laundry.

It has no role in cleaning stains / removing dirt. You just end up with sterilised stains and dirt before the machine starts washing properly.

I cannot stand the smell of phenol type disinfectants. It's possible the aussi version of classic dettol might be different? Does it turn water milky White?

Honestly, if you used dettol classic or worse, Jayes Fluid, in my house I would have to move!!

The clear versions of dettol are fine though and they can also be used to destinkify a smelly / neglected washing machine!
 
Launderess is absolutely correct in this matter

It is a classic of laboratory policy, never mind medical procedures or even the banal task of diaper pails that you:

1) Remove as much of the large debris and dirt and ick first.
2) Clean oils, fats and anything sticky as best possible next.
3) Sanitize or reduce microbial load to the greatest extent possible last.

Otherwise, the microbes might not be reached by the disinfectant. They might have time and environmental trigger to encapsulate themselves, spore, etc.

It's just good science.

On a related topic, I wash my wooden kitchen utensils in the dishwasher (cue the usual discussion). Stuff too big, gets rubbed with salt.
Stuff which will fit, at all, gets zapped for 30 seconds in the microwave because even LCB only sanitizes wooden boards down a few tenths of a millimetre. The microwave will zap the beasts all the way down - and a good chop on a board or savage cut with a bread knife will go down further than the LCB can reach.

Now, of course, I suppose if one had a sufficiently strong ionizing source (as in sealed, sterile medical supplies) one could say it's fine to leave the soil....
 
Putting something in the microwave for 30 seconds won't kill bugs. All the microwave will do is slightly warm the surface of the item. You would have to heat it to quite high temperatures ... approaching 100C to make sure that it was sterilized.

You are not irradiating the item by microwaving it in the sense that all the microwaves will do is warm it up. Microwaves don't kill bacteria or anything else. The heat they create does.

If you exposed it to an ionizing radiation source e.g. gamma or x-rays of high enough intensity, it would clean it, but eh, not many households have that kind of equipment (Thankfully!)

The reality of life is that we live in a world completely covered in bacteria and viruses. You can take reasonable precautions to ensure that food preparation surfaces etc are clean, but there is really no reason to go over-board with sterilizing surfaces, particularly using anti-bacterials.

The majority of laundry can simply be washed and it will be perfectly safe.

Normal detergents will reduce the amount of bacteria on the clothes to a level that they will not cause any problems, they won't kill it completely, but in general you don't need to.

It's generally considered a bad idea to over-sterelize the environment that you live in. You need some of those bugs and your immune system needs to practice killing them too.

If you unbalance bacteria on your skin e.g. by exposing it to regular doses of anti-bacterials on clothes, you can actually cause skin problems by killing some of the bacteria and upsetting the skin's normal eco-system.

In general, I would only use those kinds of products where absolutely necessary e.g. clothes coming out of a hospital environment where MSRA or other infectious disease might be present or if my washing machine has become gunked-up. Although, that's a relative rarity if you're using your machine frequently, run the odd hot wash and use a proper quantity of detergent.
 
For what it's worth, here's the list of ingredients of Persil's anti-bacteria rinse additive.

• AQUA (WATER)
• DIDECYLDIMONIUM CHLORIDE
• C12-18 FATTY ALCOHOL 7 EO
• ISOPROPYL ALCOHOL
• POLYACRYLAT CATIONIC
• PARFUM
• COLORANT
 
mrx

I did not say that microwaves were ionizing.
I actually do know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
I can also explain the difference between stochastic and deterministic relationships.

Here is a rather well written note on the subject with link.
Oh, I was wrong about one thing - it os 30 seconds or so for a sponge and 10 minutes for wooden boards.

If you're serious about getting things clean, read this:

From http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arch/9_14_96/bob2.htm

The good news is that kitchen germs can usually be removed by some method of cleansing. On metal surfaces, Zottola says, detergent dissolves the food and microbial material. A good rubbing then forcibly evicts most of the squatters. A follow-up, sanitizing rinse--such as a solution of dilute bleach (hypochlorous acid)--will annihilate even the most tenacious hangers-on, he's found. To deter recolonization, the cleansed surfaces must stay dry.

Wood requires a different sterilization regime, Zottola points out, because its organic building blocks will react with bleach, rendering the disinfectant unavailable for killing germs. As a result, cooks have had to be satisfied with just bathing their wooden cutting boards.

In the January 1994 Journal of Food Protection, Cliver and his colleagues showed that it is possible, using soap and water, to hand scrub microbes from the surface of new or used wooden cutting boards and from new plastic ones. Plastic boards that bore the knife scars of use, however, proved resistant to decontamination by hand washing.

Bacteria below the surface of a wooden board are untouched by hand scrubbing and can remain alive at least several hours. Even though at that location they can't contaminate other foods that may contact the board, it remains prudent to kill them, says Cliver, now at UC-Davis.

In a pair of papers to be published in the Journal of Food Protection, Cliver and Paul K. Park report success in annihilating E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus with microwave heating. They contaminated wooden cutting boards with 1 billion colony-forming units per 25 square centimeters of surface and then cooked the boards on high heat in an 800-watt home microwave oven.

After 10 minutes, a medium-sized board emerged bone dry--and free of live microbes both on and below the surface. Wetting the board speeded the killing, suggesting that the microbes probably boiled to death.

The microwave can also disinfect other kitchen items. Sterilizing dry cellulose sponges took a mere 30 seconds, while wet sponges took 1 minute. Cotton dishrags required 30 seconds when dry but 3 minutes when wet.

No amount of microwaving disinfected plastic boards. That's not surprising, Cliver notes, since their surfaces never achieved cell-killing temperatures. However, studies by others have shown that the normal cycle in a dishwasher can sterilize even well-used plastic boards.

Whether you use wood or plastic cutting boards becomes unimportant at home if you are into cleaning and sanitizing--as all cooks should be, Batt argues.

Many people, however, aren't. A study published last year by scientists at the Food and Drug Administration found that 26 percent of U.S. consumers don't bother to clean cutting boards after using them for raw meat or chicken.

URL: http://able2know.org/topic/44420-1

 
Ten minutes in the microwave? Wouldn't that be hard on the microwave? Our manual says to not use the oven without something in it and I don't consider a dry piece of wood to be something that can effectively absorb the radiation - like a glass of water, for example. Someone I know - no it wasn't me ;) - put a cup of hair removal wax into the microwave and, since the wax didn't really absorb the radiation, the whole oven got really! warm after only five minutes at 800 watts. Wouldn't a dry chopping board cause a similar reaction?
 
Hi Alexander,

Nein.
Fast alles, welches wir "glauben" über Mikrowellenherde zu "wissen" basiert entweder auf längst überholte oder schlicht falsche Annahmen.

Es ist genügend "Last" im Holz vorhanden, auf jeden Fall, da ich es seit Jahren mache und - bis her - sind weder meine deutsche noch meine Amerikanische (auch nicht aus dem Jahre 1972) kaputt gegangen.

Fette und Wasser sind es, hauptsächlich, welche durch Mikrowellen schwingen und Reibungshitze erzeugen. Dies fürht schnell dazu, dass die Eiweißmoleküle klümpen und, das war's denn für die Baziloosen, wie meine Uhrgroßtante sie nannten.
 
Hi MrX, our Dettol does indeed turn the water milky white.

Packaging is identical to the UK.

I associate the smell with clean and figure the formula has been around long enough to be proven safe for use, unlike all the triclosan based stuff that has flooded onto the market in the last few years.

Occaisionally when Michaels tinea flares up, I'll add Caneston anti Fungal/Bacteria Rinse additive, but otherwise I'm not that fussed as a rule.
 
Sanitization of utensils

The very best approach to this is hot water and detergent and lots of it.

Washing your dishes and utensils in a dishwasher that heats its own water should do the trick quite nicely.

Good combination of oxygen bleach, detergent, powerful enzymes that attack proteins and scalding water run for a considerable amount of time.
 
Holy thread revival Batman!

Quick question - if one was to use pine oil, or white vinegar, what quantity or concentration would be appropriate to use? My primary machine these days is a 2005 Miele W2240. For large loads, I tend to fill it on the Delicates or even Separate Rinse cycle to get a high water level, but if I'm just doing underwear, a normal Cottons cycle fill (with Water Plus selected, of course) seems to suffice. I usually use the 95c cycle for anything needing disinfecting.

Right, the foul necromancer is off for a midnight curry!
 
First one would need to find a pine cleaning product that is registered as a disinfectant. That is the thing contains enough pine oil to actually do the job.

Having said this cannot recommend using a pine disinfectant in the wash. Your laundry will have that whiff for days, as will the machine.

If you *must* use a sanitizer in wash one recommends going with Dettol, Persil or any of the other quat based sanitizers for laundry. If expense is an issue become pally with someone who can order the stuff from commercial laundry suppliers.
 
I'm Having Good Luck

with the Lysol laundry disinfectant placed in the fabric softener cup on my SQ432. I only need it when doing pet stuff, use white vinegar there otherwise.

And please avoid any pine oil products if you have a cat; they're toxic to cats.
 

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