alt Hacker NewsSomething that made a night and day difference to all my athletic clothing is adding laundry sanitizer to the wash load.
We noticed our running clothes developing this very strong sickly sweet/sweaty smell and it would not go away. Spent time deep cleaning the washer and dryer to no avail.
We now add Lysol laundry sanitizer (just 1 cap, not the recommended 2) to every wash load and the smell completely went away instantly.
I still don't know why all the clothing suddenly developed that smell - I went my whole life without needing to do anything special to my athletic clothes until then.
Replies
FWIW, Lysol laundry sanitizer is a quaternary ammonium disinfectant, and the safety story is not necessarily amazing:
https://cen.acs.org/safety/consumer-safety/know-enough-safet...
Hopefully most of it washes out with the rest of your laundry soap.
I am personally a big fan of sodium percarbonate (just buy it from any chemical supply - don’t bother with formulations sold for laundry). It leaves no meaningful residue (once the hydrogen peroxide is released and decomposes and the pH comes back to neutral by exposure to any acid or just rinsing, any residue would be sodium bicarbonate), and it cleans and deodorizes very well, especially in hot water. Don’t get it in your hands, though, especially if it or your hands are at all damp - it, like all alkaline substances, can be nasty to any part of your body that it touches. Don’t inhale it either. Use appropriate PPE.
(In general, we humans are much more tolerant of mild and even decently strong acids than we are of bases. Even mild bases like baking soda feel a bit soapy because they saponify a tiny bit of your skin. A perfectly clean pool or tub with slightly slimy water might just have too high a pH. But you can touch fruit juices without any ill effects as long as you don’t have a cut.)
P.S. Sodium percarbonate is also the active ingredient in most coffee equipment cleaners. A little bit of it plus very hot water will remove tea and coffee stains from almost anything in a few minutes without scrubbing. Just remember the part about not touching it.
> We now add Lysol laundry sanitizer
I do as well for super stinky clothes (usually trail running stuff), but I am not sure how worried we should be about the active ingredients (quats). Since I can smell Lysol's fragrance, I assume some of those quats must be left behind as well.
"They identified chemicals that selectively damaged oligodendrocytes belong to two classes: organophosphate flame retardants and quaternary ammonium compounds"
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-common-household-chem...
> I still don't know why all the clothing suddenly developed that smell - I went my whole life without needing to do anything special to my athletic clothes until then.
It's the takeover of synthetic fibers (i.e., plastic) for everything, but especially anything athletic. Damn near everything is 100% synthetic, not even a cotton or wool blend anymore. From the high end to the low end, all synthetic.
I experience the same thing with any synthetic athletic clothes. They retain so much stink and it's so difficult to get out. And even using sanitizers the fix is very temporary and the stink comes back quickly.
I've switched to wool shirts for running and they do not have this problem. Unfortunately they are harder to find and more expensive, but so worth it for both feel while wearing and not retaining stink.