"Bounce" et al: Do you make My Life Better?

[longPath]

Addressed to fabric softener sheets in general. I recently read that they impair my towels absorbtive abilities.

Lately, they have been making my laundry smell "Mountain Fresh". Why should I bother?

[Zsofia]

You shouldn't. They're bad for your towels and just coat everything in a gross waxy thing. Plus, ugh, smell.

[Suburban Plankton]

We have a box of fabric softener sheets sitting on top of the dryer. It's been there for longer than I can remember, because we almost never use them. I can't actually remember what they are supposed to do. Personally I don't want my clothes to smell "mountain fresh"; I want them to smell "clean", which they should be if they've just come out of the wash.

[XJETGIRLX]

We stopped using them years ago. Our clothes smell just as good (since they're clean) and seem to last a lot longer.

[MsRobyn]

My family and I are all allergic to dryer sheets, so they're banned from the laundry room. Fresh linens shouldn't cause hives.

[Suburban Plankton]

My family and I are all allergic to dryer sheets, so they're banned from the laundry room. Fresh linens shouldn't cause hives.

"Scented" detergent is banned from our laundry for the same reason. So instead of smelling "Mountain Fresh", or like a "Spring Breeze", we have to settle for "Clean".

[BiblioCat]

Addressed to fabric softener sheets in general. I recently read that they impair my towels absorbtive abilities.

Yes, this exactly. Although I do like fabric softener to reduce static cling on certain things, I never use it (or the Bounce sheets) on towels. It markedly reduces the absorbtion quality of towels.
My SO insists on using it on everything, and when I have to wash my eyeglasses at his house, I end up having to dry them on my shirt, because all the towels just push the water around, rather than absorbing it. Same thing with drying dishes - there's no absorbtion.

[SugarPlum]

Huh. I had no idea about the absorption-limiting qualities of fabric softener sheets.

What I did know is that if I don't use them my clothing is a static nightmare. So I always use a sheet, sometimes two.

[BiblioCat]

When I do use them, I cut or tear them in half (sometimes thirds), and use them twice. When Bounce first came out, the sheets had small slits cut in them, which made tearing them much easier. IIRC, you could tear them into four pieces, and it worked just as well as one. I think the Bounce people copped to the fact that people were doing this, which meant they weren't buying as many as they could be, and stopped making the slits in them.
I've never needed to use two.

Using them on towels will make them fluffier and softer, but they don't absorb for shit.

[WhyNot]

I get the science behind inhibiting absorption, but my towels work just fine with dryer sheets. Weird.

I can't stand using my mother in law's towels - they're stiff, like all the soap wasn't rinsed out of them or something, because she won't use any kind of softener. She says she already has "softened" water, and I gave up trying to sort out that addled mess.

[featherlou]

You'll take my Bounce sheets from my cold, dead hands. Living in Calgary, the driest place on earth not an actual desert with extremely hard water to boot, Bounce sheets and Static Guard by the case are necessary for sanity-retention.

I do only use half a sheet, too, Bibliocat, and often re-use them. I've never really used a whole sheet in a dryer load, so I don't know how gunky it would be. My towels seem perfectly absorbent, and I don't try to clean my glasses with towels anyway.

[Orual]

LIke some other folk, fabric softener is just one of those things that's likely to give me a rash or cause general itching in unpleasant places. Also it makes clothes feel slimy.

In my experience, un-softened towels only get stiff if you hang them out to dry - out of the dryer they're perfectly normal and towel-like.

[featherlou]

I can't even imagine drying towels without a Bounce sheet - I think my dryer would explode from the static built up.

[Suburban Plankton]

The heating element in our dryer broke a couple months ago, and we were forced to do without for a couple weeks until we could get it fixed. So I strung a line and we dried all of our laundry the "old fashioned" way. Let me tell you, there is nothing better than a towel that has been line dried. Even now that the dryer is working again, I still sometimes hang the towels to dry.

[Hatshepsut]

You know how some people appear one the whole to be sane and normal, but then you happen to hit on one particular topic and they go batshit insane on you, and you realize that maybe their perspective is a bit more skewed than you had realized?

That's me and fabric softener. Fabric softener smells like weasel piss. Keep it away from my laundry or I will be forced to kill you all.

[featherlou]

I'm planning to have a clothesline in my next backyard - I agree with you on the smell of clothes dried outside, Suburban. I dry stuff on the line downstairs, but it doesn't smell nearly as good.

[Cluricaun]

Skip the sheets altogether and use the stuff that goes directly in the washing machine.

[Myglaren]

The heating element in our dryer broke a couple months ago, and we were forced to do without for a couple weeks until we could get it fixed. So I strung a line and we dried all of our laundry the "old fashioned" way. Let me tell you, there is nothing better than a towel that has been line dried. Even now that the dryer is working again, I still sometimes hang the towels to dry.

Hardly ever use the tumble dryer, always hang the washing out on the line if at all possible.
(often come home to find it wetter than it went out as it has been raining all day while I have been at work)

[BiblioCat]

Skip the sheets altogether and use the stuff that goes directly in the washing machine.

That stuff does the same thing with regard to absorbency. It's fine for clothes, but bad for towels.

[Eleanor of Aquitaine]

Skip the sheets altogether and use the stuff that goes directly in the washing machine.

Heh, a friend of mine told me about her daughter's boyfriend, who when he first went off to college washed all of his cloths in liquid fabric softener instead of detergent for the first few weeks until somebody caught him at it.

I use mildly scented detergent and unscented dryer sheets. My clothes have the very faintest whiff of "clean" when they're done. I can't stand scented dryer sheets.

I've heard that thing about dryer sheets making your towels unabsorbent, but I can't remember to omit them for my towels, which seem to work okay for me.

[Raymond Onion]

I use allegedly unscented* Bounce, but only on loads of things that will otherwise be so stuck together they would come out of the dryer ina lump. (Polyester shirts, socks.) Linens I prefer to hang on the line, weather permitting--and oddly enough, Denver weather usually has enough sunny days throughout the year that this works. When the weather dictates otherwise I can still wash my towels if I need to. I have enough sets of sheets that I never need to.

*You can't smell the sheets themselves. But if you're sitting outside while the dryer's on, there is a scent. It smells like Bounce.

[WhyNot]

Man, I wish I could dry on a line. It's a violation of our lease at least, and rumor has it, city ordinance (but I can't find a cite for that). Don't want the place looking like a tenement, I guess.

[Tuckerfan]

Man, I wish I could dry on a line. It's a violation of our lease at least, and rumor has it, city ordinance (but I can't find a cite for that). Don't want the place looking like a tenement, I guess.

You'll have to do some googling around, but there's a number of environmental groups now working to repeal all those stupid prohibitions against using clothes lines. Their argument is that its better for the environment to let the sun dry your clothes, than to dump a bunch of CO[sub:2l8n5wqd]2[/sub:2l8n5wqd] into the atmosphere.

Dryer sheets suck, IMHO. Just a way to get you to spend money on shit you don't need.

[Raymond Onion]

Man, I wish I could dry on a line. It's a violation of our lease at least, and rumor has it, city ordinance (but I can't find a cite for that). Don't want the place looking like a tenement, I guess.

We have some covenant-controlled communities where clotheslines are a violation. We made sure when house-hunting to avoid these.

It sounds much less tenementy when you call it a solar clothes dryer.

[sublight]

Man, I wish I could dry on a line. It's a violation of our lease at least, and rumor has it, city ordinance (but I can't find a cite for that). Don't want the place looking like a tenement, I guess.

Wow. The first politician to bring up such a law here would be found hanging from a laundry line the next day. For all their love of gadgets, I'd estimate some 90% of Japanese homes (ours included) dry all their laundry outdoors.

[featherlou]

We need a word for people who pay lip service to being green and then do things like pass by-laws that prevent people from hanging out their laundry - greenocrites?

[Cluricaun]

Oh, and dryer sheets aren't totally useless. Stuff a bunch of them in an empty toilet paper tube and you can blow, er, smoke through them and they replace burning rope smells with Mountain Spring smells.