Roseark...When is your new Electrolux Wave Touch set being delivered??? Your experience with Tide he Powder is the EXACT reason I have decided to NEVER use it again. Over the years with my Miele units, I would always try and go back to Tide he Powder. I actually like the scent A LOT, and it is so affordable and available everywhere. Everytime I used it though, my clothes seemed "coated" and looked dull. Stains and odors were gone, but the clothes did not look bright and fresh. The BIG thing in both my Miele units and also my new Electrolux units, was that after every load using Tide he Powder...the stainless steel wash drums were coated, dull and if you ran your finger across the steel drum & and then looked at your finger..you could see a faint white residue on my finger! Every load! Whites, colours, sheets...warm water, hot water, cold water, sanitize, etc... I called our local water district and asked them, and the said with my zip code we do NOT have "hard" water. Tide just makes my clothes and stainless wash drum look horrible. Love my Persil and actually Sears Ultra Plus he Powder with Stain fighters. It's great and SO, SO cheap!!!

Charlie's Soap is wonderful! As time goes on, and as we use various different products, I think it's easy to lose sight of what it feels like to have truly clean clothing against your skin. I hesitated to try Charlie's Soap initially because it lacked enzymes, but I don't know how that translates into real results. I must say that my clothing feels much better against my skin, I haven't had a single bout of itching, and I'm amazed at how long my kitchen towels last between washings. My towels would smell bad pretty quickly before, but after washing them in Charlie's I find that they are more absorbent and resist smelling "foul" for a longer period of time. For those who want enzymes, Shaklee makes a product called Nature Bright Laundry Booster and Stain Remover. It contains oxygen bleach and enzymes. I haven't used it, perhaps someone else has? Does anyone know if it works, and if it rinses as cleanly as the CS? At this point, I think I'm a CS convert. It took a couple of washes to completely eliminate the tomato stains on my partner's shirt (he had a pasta explosion in the kitchen haha), but I think that's a small price to pay for a totally natural product that makes my clothes and skin happy. Had I pre-treated the tomato stain, it probably would have disappeared in the first wash, but I'm lazy. Jerrod, I hope your CS experience is as good as mine. Let us know!

Well, I'm having some of the same adjustment issues with my new FL because I also used liquid detergent and OxiClean powder together in my old TL, predissolved in the wash water before clothes were added. And I'm just not accustomed to using powdered detergents. Before my recent research, I had just assumed that liquids are better. Oxygen bleach works "best" at higher temperatures, meaning it works much faster. But it will also work in cooler water if you give it LOTS of time to soak. I got that tip from Cooks Illustrated, when they tested stain removers. They said that if you don't want to pretreat, OxiClean will get out almost any stain, IF you give it 30 minutes, or ideally 60 minutes, to work. It works for up to 6 hours or so. So, I substituted time for temperature for fabrics I thought couldn't take the heat. With a FL that lets you dispense either liquid or powder but not both, if you want the cleaning power of OxiClean, you should use a powdered detergent: - Tide HE powder - Gain HE powder - Persil Universal Powder (NOTE: there may be other brands similarly formulated, but I have only researched these so far.) Think of these powdered detergents as already containing OxiClean --- PLUS other cleaning agents needed for dirty laundry. OxiClean contains: - sodium carbonate (55-65%) - sodium percarbonate (aka sodium carbonate peroxyhydrate or oxygen bleach) (30-40%) - ethoxylated alcohol C12-16 (2-4%) Sodium carbonate is sometimes called a "builder" because it "softens" mineral ions in hard water. It also buffers a solution to a high pH, which makes other cleaning agents like surfactants work more effectively. Most of the soils and stains in fabrics are acidic, and the high pH helps break them down. Sodium percarbonate is oxygen bleach. It contains a molecule H2O2, which has an unstable, reactive oxygen molecule that's eager to break away and go off on its own, leaving H2O behind. The oxygen molecule oxidizes stains in fabrics. (It's kind of interesting that this same process happens inside our bodies, where the reactive oxygen molecules are called free radicals. Strongly-colored plant-based foods, like berries, coffee, tea, curcumin, etc., contain antioxidants that neutralize the free radicals that otherwise wreak havoc on cells. It's the same reaction as in your laundry. With laundry, we think of the oxygen as getting rid of the berry stain, and in our bodies, we think of the berries as getting rid of the free radical oxygen molecules.) Ethoxylated alcohol is a surfactant, which is needed to remove oils from items being cleaned, to make OxiClean an "all-purpose" cleaner and stain remover. OxiClean, however, does NOT contain enough surfactant to remove the oily body soils in a load of laundry. The powdered detergents I discussed in my post above (Tide, Gain, Persil) contain those exact same ingredients, PLUS add more to make the formula better for cleaning laundry. Think of them as OxiClean PLUS: - an oxygen bleach activator, to make the oxygen bleach work even if the wash temperature is not super hot - more surfactants, because oily body soils are a main component of dirty laundry - a hard-water builder system that's more effective than sodium carbonate - a polymer or emulsifier to keep the soils away from the fabrics once they've been pulled off by the surfactants - protease enzyme to break down protein-based stains like blood, grass, etc into small particles. The oxygen bleach can then break down those small particles much faster than it otherwise would. - optical brightener. All white and light-to-medium colored fabrics contain these, and refreshing them in the laundry makes the fabrics LOOK dramatically brighter and cleaner. - ingredients to stabilize the oxygen bleach so that it doesn't react with the moisture in the air while it's sitting on the shelf Those ingredients are like a cleaning orchestra, where the ingredients are more effective together than they would be separately. I do not think you will gain any cleaning power by adding liquid detergent. Everything you need for cleaning (mainly, the additional surfactants) is already in the powder detergent. And all the OxiClean ingredients are already in it too. To make these powder detergents work their best, use hot wash temperatures OR longer soak times. (Or both, if you have horrific stains.) The activator in Tide/Gain makes the oxygen bleach work better at lower wash temperature, 30-40 C (84-104 F). Above 40C/104F, the activator in Persil works equally well. So in general, Tide/Gain will clean better in American machines and for users who choose "warm" as the wash temperature to be more gentle to fabrics.

THE BEST PRICE FOR PERSIL MEGAPERLS can be found at www.betterproductsonline.com. Here are links to the lowest price per load for both Megaperls products: Persil Megaperls Color @ $0.89/load Persil Universal Megaperls @ $0.89/load I have not been able to find these products for less on a $/load basis. The 5-pouch bundles of the 18-load 1.215 kg product at Better Products Online yields the lowest cost per load and lowest cost per kg ($13.17) that I could find online. I just submitted an order, as my current stock is running low. The above pricing is for the concentrated Megaperls products. They also contain the regular Persil Universal powder as well as liquid varieties and Perwoll. You may want to look those up to see if their prices are lower on those as well. Free shipping too!