Go Cold!

By Elizabeth Hashagen

Okay- so right off the bat I have to admit -- I don't do the laundry in my house. My husband is a saint and takes care of the clothes.  He might just be scared I'd wreck his stuff, or he knows I'll have the best of intentions but forget them in the wash and have them smelling worse!!  So I'm in charge of putting them away. 

So even though i'm not a domestic goddess, I still found out some pretty interesting laundry info that could just change the way you wash.It really comes down to cold. While I don't like the cold winter weather--your clothes will like cold water washing!! Did you know that 90% of the energy used in washing clothes goes toward heating the water?  So it makes sense that washing in cold would make a difference. But I wondered how much of a difference could it really make, and here's what I found out on the Treehugger website: Pressing the cold/cold button (instead of the hot/warm button) on your washing machine has the same impact as...- driving about 9 miles in a car, or the production, transportation and storage of a six pack of beer. Surprising right!  And you should multiply that impact by 392--That's the number laundry loads an average U.S. home washes in a year (Did I mention my husbands a saint X's 392?). And your colors will last longer on cold too!! (Only if it's really dirty do you need to go to warm.) And get this--Treehugger says washing every load on the hot/warm cycle (in a top loading machine and an electric water heater) for a year is equivalent to burning about 182 gallons of gasoline in a car!! And if you wash with the hot/cold cycle, you'll end up with 2,407 pounds of CO2 per year -- just over a metric ton -- which is equal to about one round-trip cross-country flight.

Have you decided to change which button you push? I changed ours last night...

Comments

[Bob]

Happy Birthday Elizabeth!!!