A bag fulla balls are better'n detergent?!

What wondrous things are discovered by modern worldians!

Who'da thunk!

ole joyful

P.S. I hope someone'll tell the rural Korean women who (granted - over 50 years ago) used to wash their clothes by putting them on a rock and hitting them with a stick while squatting by a stream.

o j

The history of laundry is interesting. Wealthy people used to only do a "great wash" once or twice a year as your wealth could be judged by your owning so many underclothes or bed clothing that you didn't need to wash them often. Think festering heaps of composting dirty clothes.

Whacking clothes on a rock in a stream loosen the dirt and the water carries it away but we expect our clothes to be degreased and more or less deodorized and whacking with a stick doesn't do that, nor for that matter does whacking with a ball full of beads. It isn't soap.

There is a short story out there that describes a woman in France going to a wash house to wash clothes and she soaped the clothes and smacked them with a flat paddle raising a scrum of soap and dirt that she then scraped away. Interesting right. Soap grabs hold of dirt or what ever and then forms flock-the stuff that formed a bathtub ring back in the day but detergents have all sorts of additives that have the ability to connect to a water molecule and so disperse the packet of soap and dirt plus detergents have other fancy things.

So no a washing ball isn't going to do more that whack on your clothes but if they aren't particularly dirty you might not notice for awhile. A great pity because it sounds like a nice idea.

We await your assessment with bated breath!

If you lived next door to one/two/some of those wealthy women of yesteryear with a houseful of increasingly dirty clothes, thus lacking the fresh smell of clothes just off of the clothesline ...

... were you to complain to them, do you think that they might complain back that you were being too "nosey"?

ole joyful ... who lives within a couple of miles of Canada's largest city's recently acquired new "land-fill" (double four-letter word) or, pretty well the same thing, "dump" (single four-letter word)

I did a wash today and the clothes smell clean as if I had added detergent. I did use hot water this time.

I found those washing balls brand new still the box at a goodwill store. I bought it, but didn't really notice anything different in the cleaning or smell in my laundry. I'll stick to Norwex laundry soap, no fillers.

So let me understand this. Soap and water for our hands to prevent illness but our clothing which are harboring all the bacteria of day to day living, touching,sitting, bodily fluids etc. are going to get clean by being swished in plain water?

I don't think so.

Did you hear about the English monarch of a few hundred years ago who stood on a headland (maybe) ...

... and told the Tide not to come in?

ole joyful

It soon Dawned on him that he wasn't ruler of everything.

(Way before the 1760-70s).

o j