Visiting my parents, my mom seems disappointed to find me washing my clothes in cold water, she says it’s just not right but couldn’t quite explain why.
I’ve washed all of my laundry using the “cold” setting on washing machines for as long as I can remember. I’ve never had color bleeding or anything similar as seems to affect so many people.
EDIT: I love how this devolved into tutorials on opening Capri suns, tips for murders, and the truth about Australian peppers
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A rule of thumb in chemistry is that for every increase of 10°C reaction rate doubles. Those numbers are never precisely right but it’s the right ballpark for practical situations, if you start doing experiments on the surface of Venus you would probably need a different heuristic. it’s also true for physical reactions like dissolving things in water. So hot water dissolves things faster than cold water and all detergents would work faster in hot water than cold.
With modern detergents the cold water works well enough that it’s not worth the energy to heat the water up. With older detergents you needed the higher reaction speeds to make washing practical.
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