Laundry. I’m pretty sure it breeds in my house. One minute I’ve got the washing basket empty and then the next time I look it’s full again. How is that even possible?
I try my best to stay on top of the washing, but at times it is just impossible. At the moment we’re living in a tiny little rented flat and whilst it came with a washing machine, we don’t have a tumble dryer or even a washer dryer like I used to have in my last house. Luckily the block of flats does have a communal drying area – a square area that is zig-zagged with washing lines and surrounded by high walls. Amazingly it does seem to get both the sun and a good breeze, but it’s also where all the rubbish bins are also kept. It’s not perfect, and is certainly not at all photogenic for a blog post (hence re-using an old photo of washing out on the line in my old garden!), but it serves its purpose and we’re incredibly lucky to have it.
Hanging wet washing in an already cramped flat is no fun at all, and also just encourages mould to grow everywhere unless you ventilate it properly. Also something that’s not always easy when you’re living on the ground floor, as you don’t want to leave windows open when you’re not at home. I therefore plan my washing around the weather forecast even more than I used to do before and so find that I have some days where I feel like I’m constantly go backwards and forwards to the drying area to hang things out. It’s a far cry from being able to hang washing out in my own garden and having the luxury of a dryer for when the weather is not good, but I keep reminding myself that this is only temporary.
When BritMums asked me to take part in the Ecover Laundry Challenge it was a challenge that I was pleased to accept. I think I’ve become a bit of a demon at laundry over the years, especially with two small children in the house. What I decided to do with this particular challenge though was try out new Ecover Non-Bio Laundry Concentrated Detergent on my family without telling them. I stopped using my normal brand and instead switched to this for a couple of weeks and used it in exactly the same way and kept an eye on the results to see how it fared. I also felt that my kids didn’t exactly need to know that I was reviewing laundry detergent, as knowing them they would have only taken it as an excuse for getting dirtier than normal or generating more laundry than they usually do. Hence my stealth review tactics.
Now the laundry we generate in our household is a mixed bag. I have, well, normal clothes and I guess wear them much as normal people do. I’m not particularly messy or dirty. Well, I don’t think I am. Master C and Little Miss C are both at school (infant and junior respectively) and their school uniform is well worn. Master C still spends a lot of time on his hands and knees on the floor playing with trains and I swear has a magnetic style attraction to anything dirty or wet in the school playground. Less than a month in and I’ve already had three occasions where the trousers I’ve sent him to school in have come home in a carrier bag as he got so wet or dirty and instead he’s wearing the classroom spare pair.
LMC is a bit cleaner than her brother, but that step up from infants to juniors has coincided with them being given a little more independence when it comes to using paint, felt tip pens and whiteboard markers. Her school cardigan and jumpers seem to come home with various marks on them. My OH has also been known to sometimes wear some of his food – a side effect of many meals being taken at the wheel of his car – but he also has work issued white shirts that he wears with the company logo on them. They can look very smart when clean, but the logo being printed on them means that they can’t be washed at more than 30 degrees.
Add to all those clothes enough bedding and towels for five of us, and the clothes my step-daughter leaves behind after she’s visited, and you can see why I’m up to my eyeballs in laundry some days.
So, how did I get on with the Ecover laundry detergent? Brilliantly is the short answer. Our washing machine isn’t the best and there have been a few times since we moved in that I’ve had to put clothes back through the machine again, but I’m pleased to say that this wasn’t the case at all with the Ecover detergent – which makes me think that I may have been blaming my machine for what was actually the fault of the previous detergent I was using. Everything came out of the machine wonderfully clean with various paint, food and mud marks removed. The collars on my OH’s shirts were clean and the whole shirts looked brilliantly white when I hung them out to dry, despite having only been washed at 30 degrees.
The thing that I particularly love about Ecover laundry detergent is the smell. I can’t quite put my finger on what that scent is, and I should add that it’s not a heavy scent at all, but it is so wonderfully refreshing and somehow makes everything smell clean, without having a chemical smell. And it’s a smell that lingers when the washing is dry too. I’ve found with some detergents before that the smell can vanish once you’ve dried everything, but that’s not the case here.
I also like how soft everything feels after washing with the Ecover laundry detergent, especially my towels. Hanging things out to dry definitely has a different effect to drying in the tumble dryer, but still they felt soft whilst retaining that slight edge to them that towels need if they’re actually going to get you dry. Comments were even made at home about how good the towels were after they’d been washed. I’ll take that as a good result in my stealth testing!
So it’s a big thumbs up in this household for the new Ecover Non-Bio Laundry Concentrated Detergent. It washed really well, removed dirt and marks, smelt nice and left the washing feeling soft. The fact that it is concentrated means that you need less of it in each wash, in turn meaning that there is less packaging used than for non-concentrated detergents. I’m also a huge fan of Ecover ethical and green standpoint on things which makes them an easy brand to fall in love with.
This post is an entry for BritMums #EcoverLaundry Challenge, sponsored by Ecover.
Kate says
Great to hear how you got on – commenting for myself and on behalf of BritMums and thanking you for taking part