Pour Vinegar in Your Washing Machine and Watch What Happens (6 Uses Farmhouse Mothers Swore By)

Pour Vinegar in Your Washing Machine and Watch What Happens (6 Uses Farmhouse Mothers Swore By) Two cups of white vinegar, an empty washing machine, and the hottest cycle it has. You have probably seen the video. And the machine really does smell clean afterward. What nobody shows you is what hot acid does to the rubber seal around the door, month after month, right up until the week it leaks. If you watched my videos on laundry and on towels, I told you to do this too. I was wrong, and this is the correction I owe you. Vinegar is not the problem. Where it goes is the problem. It dissolves crust, old soap, and minerals, and that is the whole of what it does. Pointed at crust, it is the best two dollars in your house. Pointed at rubber or at stone, it takes something from you slowly. In this one, the six places my mother's jug of vinegar truly earned its keep, and not one of them is inside the machine. The little drawer that hides years of black crust. The load that comes out clean and smelling sour. The wool sweater that turned scratchy. The yellow under the arms of good white shirts. The story about vinegar setting dye, which is not true. And the lint screen in your dryer that looks clean but is sealed shut, which is part of the reason your towels still come out stiff. WHAT YOU NEED White vinegar Oxygen bleach (sodium percarbonate) for the machine itself An old toothbrush A bucket or a basin For stripping towels: borax, washing soda, and powdered detergent with no bleach A soft brush and a little dish soap Wool dryer balls WHAT I MENTION Washer makers and Consumer Reports both warn that vinegar can wear out the rubber seals and hoses inside a washing machine over time. Vinegar does not set the dyes used in clothes today. The yellow under the arms comes from the aluminum in antiperspirant meeting sweat, and vinegar dissolves those aluminum salts. Never mix vinegar and bleach. Together they give off chlorine gas. Vinegar dulls granite, marble, and stone tile, and that does not come back. SOURCES Consumer Reports, on cleaning a washing machine Whirlpool and Maytag care guidance on vinegar and rubber seals Tide and Arm and Hammer, on stripping towels National Fire Protection Association, on dryer fires Tell me in the comments what came off that little drawer. And tell me what part of the country you are writing from. I read every one. Nothing here is lost. Just untaught. #laundrytips #vinegar #farmhouse #oldways #cleaningtips