Stop Using Your Washing Machine As a Basket
As our name suggests, if there’s a way to make life easier or reduce the time we spend doing things we’d rather not do, we’re ready for it. And sometimes, in our quest to find solutions to make life easier, we come across certain tricks or tips that seem to save time and energy, but in the end create more work.
One such example is the use of an (empty) washing machine as a basket for dirty clothes. Here’s what you need to know.
Your washing machine is not a hindrance
Everything seems so logical. When clothes get dirty, we take them off and put them somewhere separate from clean clothes, whether in a basket thrown on a chair or in a pile on the floor. Then, when we have enough of these clothes and used laundry, we will throw them into the washing machine and load one or two things.
So it makes sense to skip the middle step (i.e. the pile on the floor) and put your dirty clothes right in the washing machine, right? Unfortunately, this is not so.
According to Jim Ireland, owner of the Manhattan cleaning companyWhite Glove Elite , storing dirty clothes in the washer between uses is a bad idea because it will reduce the light and airflow in the vat/drum, preventing it from drying out completely.
“It can encourage mold or mildew to grow on your clothes,” Ireland told Apartment Therapy . “Mold growths or colonies can start growing on a damp surface within 24 to 48 hours. They can grow on your clothes and reproduce with airborne spores that cause mild health problems.”
Not only that, Chuck Gerba, Ph.D. , a professor of environmental biology at the University of Arizona whose research focuses on germs in washing machines, says that dirty underwear often contains feces; in particular, “about a tenth of a gram of excrement in an average pair, ” he told ABC News .
And because feces can contain many different germs (including the hepatitis A virus, norovirus, rotavirus, salmonella and E. coli), Gerba says it’s really not something you want in your washing machine any longer than it should be.