Talkback: Tip - Clean Your Machine

Just googled oxy clean - any particular type, parky?

Hello Parky,

Getting very domesticated here but how much Citric Acid do you need to put in the washer to descale it.

 Thank you.

hydrogen peroxide....as mouthwash?  Please tell me you are kidding Parky...it'll eat your teeth in the end..

yep gof. at about 1% max solution (e.g. 6% vol solution diluted 6 times). as recommended by a dentist. the neat stuff is also good for disinfecting and controlling gunk on toothbrushes - electric and manual.

by accident i discovered it's also great for small cuts and grazes as it kills the dead cells (if you get what i mean, or not as i don't know to explain it) round the edges and makes it heal faster. stings like hell too for added frission.

citric acid...lol. i just put "some" in from the jar i have - probably around 4 - 6 tbs. i've no idea if this is the correct amount. mm. thinks - find out how much is in a packet of retail descaler. being an inveterate label reader and what's in that then (gawd bless product hazard sheets) i discovered that that this [particular brand was 50/50 citric/acetic acids with a little bit of detergent for added measure. (citric acid = lemon juice; acetic acid = vinegar).  a teaspoon of it boiled up in the kettle from time to time gets rids of limescale in that.

i bought a lot of citric acid (it wasn't worth buying small qauntities by mail due to postage) from ebay. it's used to make bath bombs (with sodium bicarbonate - and HOW much do they charge you for a bath bomb!). it also comes in handy jam making, pickles and curries.

you can use white vinegar for the job too if you like - note white vinegar only.

dri-pak sell a variety of "old fashioned" cleaning products - "old fashioned" in that they call them what they are instead of inventing a anme and using it as the main ingredient. the dri-pak site is well worth a good mooch around.

http://www.dri-pak.co.uk/

i wash my paramo outerwear at 50C (do so at your own risk) when it's being subjected to a "Parky Proof" as i found that much better at actually getting all the muck out of it with less washes than at 40C. my logic was that the fabric gets that hot in the sun and certainly does when being dried.

i wouldn't risk anything hotter than that though. and of course paramo doesn't have any seam taping to worry about.

interim washes are at 40C.

i'll chuck all sorts of things into the machine to see if it works or not - trainers come up a treat - again with the logic that they exist in temperature much hotter than the wash in the real world unless manufacturers make different products for our temperate climate and that found in a desert or tropics.

If you use washing powder, you might find that the powder drawer and the water path are encrusted with rather a lot of residue, and this really needs cleaning away.  Some sort of plastic scraper and toothbrush are the only way, and then keep it clean.

Or use liquid detergent in a dispenser ball...

Our old washing machine used to have a removeable drawer, it made washing waterproof very easy.

Of course our new does not have a removeable one

Mike fae Dundee wrote (see)

Maybe it's because we have soft water, but i never bother cleaning out the machine. The Grangers goes straight in, no problem.

Sig's are a waste of bandwidth...

At last, one of the most sensible articles I've seen on cleaning in the outdoors media, rather than blindly toeing the line of the tech wash brigade. I've been posting on the importance of removing all traces of detergent from DWR coated msterials after washing for donkeys of years. The D in DWR stands for Durable and it is NOT destroyed by a few washes (well at least the fluorocarbons used by most companies - Nikwax was anything but durable, but I see they now claim improved durability). However its action is totally nullified by leaving traces of detergent after washing - its all at the molecular level so you only need a trace of detergent to nullify a DWR.

If your washing machine is caked up, there's always going to be sufficient detergent in the rinse water to nullify a DWR. Getting rid of the deposits may be difficult, the cheap cleaners available in the supermarket are useless, but a few cleans with this stuff  may work. Cleaning the drawer doesn't do anything to clean the internals of the machine and you are still liable to get deposits even if you use liquid detergent. In soft water areas you may not get the difficult to shift lime/detergent crud, but detergent buildup is still possible.

Another tip, once you have a clean machine, is simply to repeat the rinse cycle if using detergent. The concentration of detergent in the rinse water reduces exponentially with the number of rinses.