A Quick Guide to Frugal Laundry Pre-treaters

by Mary Ann Romans | More from this Blogger

If you read my earlier article, The Frugal Washing Machine, you'll notice that it got a lot of comments from wonderful frugal folks with great ideas about laundry. One of the topics that stood out was the one about using pre-treatments for laundry stains. It was a really interesting discussion, and I thought I might explore different ways of saving money when pretreating laundry.

The first choice, in my opinion (shared by so many of you) is that if you use a good laundry detergent, you won't need to pretreat your clothing. My biggest vote for a laundry detergent that gets out the most stubborn stains is Tide in the powdered version. It seems to easily get out about 90 percent of my stains.

For really stubborn stains, such as blood or the results of a poopy cloth diaper, I have found that a little baby shampoo gets the stain right out. it is much less expensive that those standard pre-treaters, and it is very gentle on skin. Now I usually do this as soon as I notice a stain, so I am not sure how it might work on something that has been srt in for a long time.

One great way of pretreating for stains is to soak the soiled laundry in a 1/2 gallon of hot water and 1/2 cup of dishwashing liquid. The seems to work especially well for whites and light colors. Just make sure, of course, that your fabric can handle the hot water.

Valorie Delp shared her pretreating secret. Well, actually it is more of a post-treating secret. If her laundry detergent alone doesn't get out the stain, she catches the item before it hits the dryer and sets in to the fabric. Instead, she takes it and soaks it in a bucket with a combination of 1/4 cup Cascade dishwashing detergent and 1/4 cup color safe Clorox bleach. Valorie tells us that this treatment can remove even set in stains!

Mary Ann Romans also writes for the Computing Blog here at Families.com where she shares everything from the latest news on technology to cool downloads and fun websites.

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Learn more about Mary Ann Romans

Mary Ann Romans is a freelance writer, online content manager, wife and mother of three children. She lives in Pennsylvania in the middle of the woods but close enough to Target and Home Depot.

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