I got interested with these symbols when my son was born and I was doing all of our laundry what seemed like all hours of the day. So it was a good opportunity to play with machine learning and vision edge by gcp. Ended up building a pair of apps for iOS and android that can identify the symbols
I noticed a huge difference in how long my clothing lasts once I switched to hang-drying most things. It's not that huge of a hassle and saves energy and I don't have to buy clothes as often. I started doing a lot more hang drying after I bought a bunch of merino wool base layers I use for skiing (which can't really be machine dried).
If you look near the laundry baskets at any home or department store, you'll find comically large 'lingeree bags'. Turns out running anything with a fine weave through these - satin, rayon, exercise clothing, high TPI pillow cases - not only makes them last longer but also prevents pilling.
Always button and zip your jeans, and if you're not in a hurry, cotton clothing seems to be less worn by friction in the dryer than by the high heat. I run a lot of my cotton knits through twice on permanent press instead of once on cotton. And I don't use dryer sheets. Dryer sheets keep your clothes from getting static cling when you have over-dried them, but over-drying them damages them. The static cling is a symptom that you shouldn't ignore.
What you want to do is pull your clothes out when there is just a hint of moisture in them. The air and the latent heat should be more than enough to suck out that last hint of dampness. And if one towel or pair of pants is still damp, nothing stops you from running them by themselves for a couple minutes while you fold the rest.
I do this for cycling clothing. (Almost all synthetic, some wool, fair amount of spandex-y stuff.)
This stuff lasts forever when washed on cool/warm and then hung.
Friends of mine have complained about one brand or another not lasting very long, but they've been tossing the stuff in the drier.
We're fortunate to have a basement with a nice beam I can place hangers on (for winter drying), or a hanging bar I fitted in the garage (for summer). Lately I've been getting rid of 8-10 year old stuff that I no longer like or no longer fits, and it's sellable, as opposed to just worn out.
(Doesn't sell for much, but folks will happily pay $20 - $30 for special print cycling jerseys that are still in good shape and cost $80-130 new. Way better than tossing them in the trash.)
If hang-drying outside, turn your stuff inside out.
UV from the sun kills bacteria, and you want that on the side near your skin, and as a bonus the inside fades (UV again) but the outside doesn't. I have some t-shirts that are quite faded on the inside but still reasonable on the outside.
I assume you mean 40 C, not 40 F? I started washing everything on cold (my washer actually has a 'Tap Cold' setting - just tap water) and it works just as well. I encourage everyone to just try it once - it won't hurt anything and you can always re-run the load - and you will never go back. Also, you don't have to sort clothes.
I read in some credible, non-technical publication, I think the NYT or WSJ, an interview with a engineer in that field (something like detergents or washing machines) who said that detergents used to need heat to enhance the chemical reaction, but that it's no longer true and cold water works just as well.
EDIT: Does anyone know a good technical, authoritative resource on laundry? Consumer Reports has well-researched info, but not in the depth I'd like.
> When a family member is sick, use hot water mixed with chlorine bleach to reduce bacteria in the bed linens and towels. The same goes for cleaning dirty cloth diapers, or other messes.
But also,
> Heating water accounts for about 90 percent of the energy needed to run a washer
So when different clothes prescribe washing at different temperatures, it's because the ‘activation’ temperature of detergent changes depending on whether you use it with jeans or underwear?
As far as I know the clothes don’t prescribe a temperature to be washed at, but rather a maximum temperature threshold upto which the material can withstand without risking damage to itself.
So a 40°C cloth can be washed at any lower temp but might deform or loose color or even breakdown if washed warmer than that.
Instructions haven't kept up w/ washing machines and detergents.
> "Front-loaders and high-efficiency top-loaders run normal cycles 10 percent cooler than agitator washers, and the 'warm' wash temperature in the U.S. has declined by 15 degrees over the past 15 years," says Tracey Long, communications manager for P&G's fabric care products in North America. “Traditional detergent enzymes can be sluggish in cold water so we worked to create a mix of surfactants and enzymes that deliver cleaning performance in cold water across all product lines," says Long.
> Consumer Reports’ past tests found detergents have gotten much better at putting enzymes to work in removing dirt and stains at lower water temperatures, and are less effective at higher temperatures.
If you want to sanitize anything, just use some bleach. It's harsh on fabric, but so is hot water, and the bleach will do a much better job. (FYI, I don't have any whites at all.)
My understanding that was for the special fabrics and/or the dyes used. For example raw indigo bleeds a whole lot more with higher heat. I know there are some fabrics and blends that are fragile compared to something like a cotton tshirt and recommend colder water.
A tip we rediscovered a few years ago(it's well over a century old) is that adding a bit of borax to the washer not only helps get your laundry cleaner, but it will make all your laundry smell better, too, since borax/boron is an extremely powerful agent for killing bacteria, molds, and fungus. My wife is sold, and almost refuses to do the wash w/o borax anymore!
(This might even help deal with the continually scummy front-loader problem, but I can't speak to that as we prefer our 33-year-old Kenmore top loaders that can still actually be repaired rather than replaced with expensive new Chinese/Korean crap every few years. Mechanical timer controls and durable design and mfg FTW! For what it's worth, our total cost of purchase and repairs over 33 years is maybe $1200.00 for the washer/dryer set.)
Or maybe a broken thermostat heater. Apparently this is a separate component sometimes.
What on earth is thermostat heater, you ask? Surprisingly, many dryers apparently have a simple fixed-temperature thermostat, and in order to make lower settings work, a heating element tricks that thermostat into perceiving a higher temperature.
If that heating element doesn't do its job, then the dryer acts like it's always on the highest setting.
> The thermostat heater is often located within the cycling thermostat. However, it may sometimes be a separate component mounted to the dryer's cycling thermostat. Depending on the dryer's temperature setting, more or less voltage is supplied to this heater. Low settings supply more voltage and create more heat, while medium settings supply slightly less voltage, generating less heat. High heat settings will not energize the thermostat heater at all. In this way the thermostat is tricked into thinking that the dryer is hotter than it actually is, so it opens at a lower drum temperature.
That's not true though. The additional energy to create that heat doesn't have to equal the time saved.
You'll notice this in heat pump dryers. They cannot generate the same amount of heat. They take way longer to dry the clothes. But they're way more energy efficient than other forms of dryers.
Edit: I thought of another example. Heating your home with hot water running through radiators. It's significantly more energy efficient to reduce the temperature of the water. This outweighs the additional time it takes to heat up your home. There are various drawbacks and considerations though, e.g. if the house has terrible insulation (noticeable draft) then it'll not be beneficial. There's various other things that'll significantly reduce energy usage, this while anyone would assume that generating heat is already very efficient.
To some extent drying clothes is generating heat (evaporation heat). If you're clever about it you might be able to avoid heating the (wet) clothes and rest of the contents of the dryer (or the outside!) too much. However evaporating water requires an incredible amount of energy, even if you just boil water away then most of the energy is still spent evaporating the water rather than heating the water, so it's not really too clear-cut that running a dryer hot is massively inefficient.
Edit: Also it's not that using lower-temperature water to convey heat is somehow more efficient, the thing with heat pumps is that they are more efficient at heating things to a lower temperature. If you're burning gas it doesn't really matter either way, you just get the energy out you put in.
> so it's not really too clear-cut that running a dryer hot is massively inefficient.
My heat pump dryer came with an energy estimate for various functions and loads. The various functions which shorten the time, or the functions which increase the heat (often related) are specified to use way more energy. To me, it's pretty clear, plus the manufacturer specifies it.
> Also it's not that using lower-temperature water to convey heat is somehow more efficient. [..] If you're burning gas it doesn't really matter either way, you just get the energy out you put in.
That's what I used to assume as well. It isn't accurate though. If the water that comes back to the heating element is too hot it'll not be as efficient as when the temperate is lower. Similarly, the additional energy that's needed to heat the water to e.g. 75+ degrees Celsius is wasteful. You can save around 30% of the energy by reducing the temperature of the water that's used to heat your home (though might not work due to various considerations). There are loads of other things that are possible which also significantly reduce the energy usage.
Regarding how to save energy when using a boiler there's a huge Dutch topic about it with loads of tips: https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2027810. I assume similar information can be found in other languages, though heating using gas and water is really popular in NL (more so than any other country I assume).
> energy needed to heat water to 75+℃ is wasteful. You can save around 30% by reducing water temperature to heat your home
That depends. For resistive electric it shouldn't make a difference, pretty much all heat is transported.
For non-condensing gas (or wood etc.), if your heater is going full blast and a lot of the heat goes up your chimney and lowering the temperature makes a smaller, slower flame, that gets absorbed better, I think you could get 10-30% difference. The heating of water itself to 20℃, 75℃ or 110℃ shouldn't make much of difference, as you're not supposed to cool the effluents too much, or you get condensation, acids, rust ... which will likely kill you equipment.
Condensing gas is cool, extracting so much heat, that water condenses, but the gas must be clean enough and the condenser resistant to corrosion. Here, lowering water temperature can safely lower the effluent gas temperature for more heat extraction (even in optimal power range), and condensation of resulting water vapor from burning gas is about 10% extra energy that would otherwise go up the chimney. I'd expect about 15-30% more heat than non-condensing, especially if run on lower temperatures.
Heat pumps are quite efficient at moving heat, where 1W of electricity can move 3W of heat for a 4W heating yield. A steeper gradient means more work, so pumping heat from 20℃ to 75℃, 1W may only move 0.5W of heat for 1.5W yield (numbers not accurate). Lowering the temperature can make a 2x difference, or even more in extreme cases.
I wouldn't be too trusting of the claims of a manufacturer who's main selling point is the savings in energy...
They might still be true though, but if you keep in mind that it takes about 5 times more energy to evaporate water than to heat it to 100C, and that heating water is more difficult than most other substances it is really not clear why using more heat would be (far) less efficient. Sure it would consume heat at a higher rate, but also less long.
I'm not sure if heating with cooler water is more efficient.
Some places you pay for the joules delivered into your home. You have flow meter and temperature meters on he input and the output of the radiators and the price for joule is constant regardless of input and output temperatures.
What saves you money is keeping your interior cooler because heat loss is propotional to the temaperature difference.
Dutch energy companies by law have to advise their customers how to save money. The app I use give exactly this advice (lower the temperature), plus various other advices.
> Some places you pay for the joules delivered into your home
That's something different than what I said, no? I'm talking about when you generate the heat in your home. I'm aware of that solution as well, they're efficient because of volume plus part of the heat (energy required) is waste-heat from some industry.
There's still various ways to save energy despite exactly measuring the temperature out and in. E.g. radiator fans.
I know this all seems entirely illogical. Energy in (or required) should stay the same. Practically though, it's probably energy losses that somehow occur and are avoided.
E.g. for the radiator fans people measured if they save energy. They do, though the cost of buying them might outweigh the savings. DIY is cheap though.
> The additional energy to create that heat doesn't have to equal the time saved.
Right, it doesn't have to, but it's also possible that more heat makes it take proportionally less time (or close enough, with negligible decrease in efficiency).
Obviously, yes, using a heat pump will use less energy than a resistive heating element. But the question is more about how much and how quickly heat is input (regardless of how it was generated) and how that affects drying times.
Yes, but it's not a simple linear use of energy. For example, it might use 10x energy to dry twice as fast. That's a gain if you're in a hurry, but not so much if you're relaxing at home, on a tight budget, and/or have unusually high cost of electricity.
It might, but does it actually? Or does it use 2.05x energy to dry twice as fast, making the energy use difference negligible?
Edit: Consider also that the shorter you run the dryer for, the shorter you are running the (substantial) motor and fan, as well as less time spent heating the shell of the dryer and the air surrounding it.
Depends, for most dryers the temperature is limited because water evaporation is taking all the energy. The motor takes the same energy per time, so twice as fast actually uses less energy. However there is a limit to this, eventually (the end of the cycle) you reach the point where water isn't evaporating fast enough to use up all the input energy and temperatures go up to heating clothing fibers to no useful purpose and this is wasteful.
Also, is the dryer located in a climate-controlled part of your home? If so, the air that it exhausts will be made up in equal volume by outdoor air pulled into your living space. How much extra energy does that make your heater or AC use?
From an industry pdf I stumbled across, it looked like moisture sensing improvements were the best bet to save the most energy. Though, I didn't see anything about comparing heat settings in that doc, which may be telling.
Until near the end of the cycle your dryer is putting all the energy into evaporating water, so the temperature inside the dryer is actually fairly cool. Right at the end things change as the remaining water isn't enough to counteract all the energy being put in and so you heat the clothing to no purpose. So at the end off the cycle you should either shut off with a little moisture in the clothing, or regulate the temperature so that the heat input is balanced by the water evaporation.
Sounds like we need ultrasonic no-heat clothes dryers to be commercialised. The technology is there - just play music to the water molecules, and they dance!
The article compares the energy savings over an already inefficient dryer. The article mentions that an existing dryer takes 50min (average). Such dryers are not what anyone should buy, they waste too much energy. Over time it's cheaper to buy a heat pump dryer. Those easily take 2.5 hours to dry. They're significantly cheaper over an e.g. 5-10 year period than buying a cheaper and way more inefficient dryer.
The links to more detail with:
> The goal of this project is to develop a clothes dryer prototype, using ultrasonic transducers, with an EF above 10 lb/kWh.
But also:
> DOE’s Building Technologies Office is seeking new clothes dryer technologies that can increase the energy factor (EF) from 3.7 to 5.43 lb/kWh
The link in the article and my link shows that the intend is to go way over 10 lb/kWh. The link I found showed it could be around 20 or even 44 lb/kWh (seems to depend on the frequency used). This while being way quicker than anything else, especially heat pump dryers.
Yup, I’ve never once in my life paid any attention to any of this, and I only ruined one sweater once. My wife was not happy, it was a brand new cashmere sweater from some brand name. Still though, if that’s my only screw up and amortized over a lifetime of not caring about this, still positive ROI for me. Twist ending: we saved the severely shrunken fancy sweater and now it fits my kids, so not a total loss.
Well, my approach is to limit my day-to-day clothes buying to just those washable in 40°C and machine dryable. Makes both the shopping and life overall so much easier.
Any women who still have to wear business attire interested in a similar approach should check out MM LaFleur. Well-designed, machine washable staple pieces at a (mostly) reasonable price. IIRC the company was founded by a young French woman who used to work in consulting and knows the pain of constantly needing to dry clean your clothes.
Yes, if you only buy things that you wash in 40 degree water and dry in a machine, you can just wash everything in 40 degree water and throw it in a machine.
My rule of thumb is basically just to exclude from the dryer anything stretchy, slippery, knitted, or lacy. With that stuff hung to dry, what’s left is all the plain cotton shirts and jeans that can take whatever you throw at them.
If you have dryer it nearly strilizes everything you just washed with hot air.
I'm washing t-shirts in 40 deg and drying them in my washing machine with built-in dryer.
They come out a bit damp to avoid creasing too much. I never had them smell even though I was just unloading dryer into a huge pile of damp clothes and leaving them like that for a day or two to dry out completely. I even forgot to take them out of the washing mashine and found out few days later. They were still damp but didn't smell. I washed and dried them again though to be on the safe side.
Most washers (especially top loading) in Japan don't support warming water so people wash with cold water, use hot bath water, or hopefully the house has hot water faucet for washer.
I've bought an expensive front loading washer-dryer with water heater (upto 60C) and heat pump dryer recently. Now I always wash with at least 15C water, even 15C, it's significant difference in cold winter situation.
It doesn't sterilize, but it does bind to viruses and bacteria so they can be washed away. It's the reason why you don't need antibacterial hand soap: you don't need to kill, washing off is enough.
The exact opposite is true. These symbols require (but do not have) translation on every piece of clothing, because almost no-one understands what they mean, and it's not currently possible to type them in to Google to identify their meaning.
On the other hand, if the text was just in a language that I did not speak, I can either type this into a translation app myself, or use the automatic translation camera on my phone to identify them.
And sure, I can apparently now do that for those washing symbols too, which is nice... but why is that information being conveyed in a "language" that almost no-one speaks? I'd be just as confused if every item of clothing I purchased had washing instructions in Lojban.
I fully understand why an attempt at standardised symbols was made, being able to communicate that information more compactly would be useful, but it very clearly failed. They're not intuitive enough to learn without third-party resources, and a very very tiny fraction of the population is willing to put in the effort to do so. Just use text.
Current state, I would have to figure out what to type into google to see what some symbol like ⧇ or △ means in laundry terms. Either better symbols I don't have to google, or text in a language that I don't speak...but can figure out. The ones with temperatures don't even have a degree mark.
It's strange that on a site like Hacker News people are so averse to learning new things. We seem to have no problem learning other kinds of symbol languages. These are standard symbols - you can search Google for "laundry symbols" to find a key
The audience for the symbols are people who do laundry for a living.
Symbols that you never use aren't very useful when all you really need to know is "do not dry", "do not bleach", "wash with like colors". It's really not that big of a deal to put a tag written in English and Spanish to the US, or in French to France, etc.
My girlfriend works in the fashion industry in Taiwan. Designers in the US make an artistic drawing of a dress. She converts it to a Gerber file using CAD software. The Gerbers get sent to factories in China or Vietnam, who make prototypes and send those to Taiwan for testing. When approved, thousands are ordered and shipped directly from the factories to Macy's or JCPenny in the US.
When artists use English, CAD designers use Traditional Chinese, and factory staff use Simplified Chinese or Vietnamese, and consumers use every language - there's a need for a standard symbol. You have a good point about dry cleaning services too!
The difficult part is that the people through this international supply chain can't type these symbols in emails, or search for them in databases. That's why a Unicode code point should be assigned.
That clothing design and production process sounds fascinating. A search on some of the terms doesn't seem to return anything useful... do you have any good reads or videos for an outsider to understand a typical workflow?
I just learned it from her directly, and was surprised when she mentioned Gerber files. I used those for PCB design, and it's the same file format that they use for clothes!
That general summary was great, and plenty of jumping-off points. And the knowing the terminology helps. Thanks.
I'm with you, it bears uncanny parallels to the PCB design workflow. Not just the Gerbers, but the component/fabric selection, simulation, design drawings, etc.
I would agree. The issue isn't that they are symbols, it is that the symbols are really hard to understand, other than hand wash where a hand is in a bucket of water the rest have little connection with the outside world.
> a pair of apps for iOS and android that can identify the symbols
Sounds like a failure of the point of those symbols. How about using words instead? Then you don't need an app to decode them. You can use google translate if you must.
The ultimate -parent- hack is to only buy colored clothes (no whites... And if you happen to get any just wash them with the colored clothes anyway) non shrinkable clothes. Dry on low - "damp dry" so they don't all get fried. One load every 5+ days. The thicker clothes hang around the edge of the clothes basket (sweat pants in our case).
Oh and I guess just by normal kid clothes (cotton/polyester) so they don't have special instructions.
I've been doing that for my own clothes. White t-shirts turn pink, but pink is a good look too so I don't really care. Maybe that means I'm still a kid :)
We do that but how on earth do you manage with only one load every 5 days? We are a family of 4, one teenager, one under 10, and we’re doing one or two loads of laundry every day.
pants can usually be reworn 2-3 times. occasionally a shirt can be reworn if it was only used for part of a day. this might require an unusually clean child. as a single adult, I do laundry on a two week cycle. and that's driven more by my inventory of season-appropriate clothing than the capacity of my washing machine.
Would you please clarify how doing laundry constantly allowed time for ML research? Is it just because you had maternity/paternity, or was there something about the laundry workflow that let you squeeze in this activity?
https://jameshrisho.com/2020/10/making-laundry-less-terrible...