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I should be a test-case for the effects of liquid chlorine bleach on front-loaders; I use LCB in 4-5 loads each week---two loads of kitchen/personal whites, a BobLoad® of white bath towels and two loads of white bed linens.

My 5-1/2 year old Frigidaire FL'er is showing no signs of trouble. (Now, if that statement wasn't a silver-platter invitation for superstitous trouble, I don't know what is, LOL!)
 
It is

Eugene, it is. The spider is made of aluminum and is deteriorating in the chlorine bleach.
From what I have read and seen, the marketing departments and young-dynamic-managers just added the dispensers for the US market without changing a thing.
When I talked to the repair department at Lowe's in Loveland this February, they told me it is their only remaining "predictable" failure with the Electrolux units (Kenmore, Frigidaire, some GE, etc.).
Part of the US resistance to oxygen bleach is because the first ones were sodium perborate and this only works in very very extremely hot water; so it is basically useless in US washing conditions - this, like the first itchy enzyme detergents conditioned US perceptions of what works for decades and, of course, the ridiculous prices for oxygen bleaches compared to chlorine in the US. They are marketed as specialty cleansers, not as the work horse normal additive as over here.
Of course, when push comes to shove - my cat who was dying of cancer, who had to have as germ free an environment as possible - I still used chlorine bleach and the 212° wash cycle. The six months of this were seven years ago and that washer is still running at a friend's house...an Electrolux.
But why chance it?
 
oxygen bleaches

I am not an expert, and I think the link below (a few years old but still valid information) will tell you much more than I can.
Basically, oxygen bleaches can be dry or wet.
Like all bleaches, the warmer the water, the better they work, but the sodium perborate formulas need the hottest water possible to work very well at all. Nowadays this is pretty much limited to dishwasher tabs, but was sold in the US for many many years as a laundry bleach. It worked so poorly in cold and lukewarm water that many folks my age associate "oxygen bleach" with "not very effective". This is wrong, of course.
In Europe, all-purpose laundry detergents tend to have one form or other of dry oxygen bleach.
Oxy-clean and similar products use oxygen bleach and other chemicals to attack stains. I don't know the formulation of oxy-clean.
Used properly, you can nearly do away with chlorine bleach and get the same results - better, really, since you can use oxygen bleaches on many fabrics which must not be chlorine bleached.
We really need one of the detergent experts here.

http://www.laundry-alternative.com/Oxygen_bleach_research.html
 
Hydrogen Peroxide (3% chemist variety or 6% hair bleach), will provide oxygen for laundry bleaching.

Sodium Perborate - The "hot water" oxygen bleach, will bleach but requires 140F water temps and above to really become effective. However modern bleach activators such as TAED, allow bleaching action to take place at 100F. Sodium perborate is difficult to rinse and has been banned by the EU for laundry purposes because of the danger boron poses to plant and aquatic life.

Sodium Percarbonate - The "cold water" oxygen bleach, will bleach in cold water as well as hot or boiling, thus has a wider reaction time and use than sodium perborate. Sodium percarbonate releases more oxygen in wash water than sodium perborate and according to some studies than liquid hydrogen peroxide.

All oxygen bleaches will work to some extent in cold temperatures, but bleaching action increases as temperatures rise. IIRC the numbers are something like a 20% increase in bleaching power for each 10 degrees of water temperature. This is why "colour safe" bleaches were traditionally sodium perborate as it wouldn't bleach using the normal wash temperatures for colours (warm or cool water). However if one washed those same colours at 140F or above, that is a different story.

Sodium perborate is somewhat inexpensive, which was the reason it was used on both sides of the pond. European laundry products have begun phasing the stuff out (Persil/Germany now contains sodium percarbonate bleaching agents), while American laundry detergents/bleaches mostly are sodium perborate (Biz, Clorox II dry), though most of the "Oxi" types are sodium percarbonate.

In general chlorine bleach is more effective in removing a wider array of stains and at lower temperatures/contact times than oxygen bleaches. However due to the damage repeated and or improper use of LCB, many prefer to use oxygen bleach. To get the whitening power of chlorine bleach, oxygen bleaches require either hot to boiling water or long contact times.

Oxygen bleaches and chlorine bleaches cancel each other out, one can be used to neutralise the other. That is you can pre-treat a bad stain with LCB, then launder with an oxygen bleach. The later will cancel out the former. White vinegar will also remove remaining traces of chlorine bleach.
 
History

The use of oxygen bleach predates automatic washing machines. Persil (PERcarbonate SILicate) was introduced in 1907 as "self-acting" washing powder. Other products were even earlier. At that time most people had no washing machine at all and whites were boiled in a large kettle, a practice that was still common in the beginning of the 1960's in the Netherlands. I remember my aunt having an extra large gas burner for the wash kettle that was placed on the kitchen floor on wash day. Automatic washing machines that became common during the 1960's continued this washing method. Chlorine bleach was used too but had a reputation of damaging fabrics and was therefore not popular.

http://www.henkel.com/cps/rde/xchg/SID-0AC83309-2E0A8D8C/henkel_com/hs.xsl/47_COE_HTML.htm
 
I was asking my grandmother about how she washed clothes over the years in her household.

Seems they got a washing machine quite early on. Her mother had one, so from the 1920s onwards.

Various technologies:
Some kind of a manually operated agitator washer with a mangle on top.
Then early Hoover single tubs with a mangle
Then Hoovermatic TwinTub
Then Hotpoint automatic agitator
Front loader automatic in 1971
and it's been that since.

She said she can't remember boiling anything ever at any stage. In fact, reckoned it would wreck the clothes if you did that and reckoned that most whites were washed at no more than about 60C other than if someone was sick or something and she needed to sterlise sheets.

If whites were dingy, they were soaked in some kind of stuff over night. In a large bucket. I assume it was oxygen bleach based.

Sequence of detergents:
Rinso & Lux
Omo
Persil and Ariel Automatic
 
Bleach in a f.l.

I've never experienced troubles in a f.l. which I could trace to use of chlorine bleach. However, nowadays I only usually use it to wash the towels I use in the kitchen or for general house cleaning, to disinfect them. I buy an oxygen bleach at Whole Foods Market made by either 7th Generation or Ecover, which is nothing but a stronger concentration of hydrogen peroxide than you get at the drugstore, I put some in with the detgergent and some in the bleach dispenser when doing my white linens and such, and they come out great. I use the "whiter whites" selection on my Duet HT and "deselect" the extra rinse, since I don't need it if I'm not using Clorox.
 
I find it amazing that the likes of P&G doesn't just launch a version a tide based on European Ariel or why Unilever doesn't just roll out Omo/Persil under the All brand or even All Omo or something.

Also, Henkel owns US soap maker Dial Corp. Persil could be launched via the Purex brand.

http://www.dialcorp.com/index.cfm?page_id=33 ?
 
I wish Unilever would do that to. It still cracks me up that if you go to http://www.wisk.com/ that instead of seeing the different Wisk detergents that it shows you how to put your kid's picture on the cover of a Life magazine. I think I might give Wisk a shot the next time I need detergent for my FL.
 
I wouldn't be surprised to find that US Wisk is the same formula as UK Persil. I'm extremely pleased with the performance of Wisk 3x HE and the green bottle ALL S&M in my FL.

The way that Dial/Henkel has positioned the Purex brand, they would never make it high end like Persil. Better to be #1 in the budget brand market than go up against the high end 1000 pound gorilla. More likely that they would come up with another brand name or revive a dead brand to introduce a high end Persil-like formula to compete with Tide. But then, their importing/marketing agreement with Miele might prevent that anyway.
 
I wonder if Henkel have rights to Persil as a TM in the US and Canada.
It's quite possible that Unilever have it there too.

Unilever definitely have it France, Ireland, New Zealand and The UK.
 

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