24 hours should be fine. In my experience, if it smells, even a little, run it through the wash again. Otherwise, it will still smell moldy after drying it. But even if this happens you can just wash it again, and the smell goes away.
1 is right. Actually just running it through a rinse cycle should be enough.
and then put your soggy t-shirt in the corner of the room,
Brings back bad memories of coaching youth soccer and being at a tournament where I shared a room with my son and two other kids on the team. Only three days and two nights, but it was drizzly the whole time. It got pretty disgusting pretty quickly and the wet, sweaty clothes smelled bad, too.
Even if it doesn't smell, cotton shirts will look really rumpled after being in the washer that long. That probably doesn't matter if you iron or can go to work looking like a clean hobo.
This seems like an epistemologically bizarre question to me. Ookie is perceptual, right? So if you can't tell it's ookie, then it's definitionally not ookie. If it seems ookie, it is.
So if you can't tell it's ookie, then it's definitionally not ookie.
There are some intersubjective concerns about how other people might be able to tell it's ookie when you can't.
I did it all for the ookie. C'mon!
The ookie. C'mon!
So you can take that t-shirt
And dry it in your, yeah!
Dry it in your, yeah!
Dry it in your, yeah!
Why did it take so long?
Why did I wait so long, huh
To get it out? But I didn't
And I'm the only one
In the laundry room
Who didn't smell it.
Slightly embarrassed at how interested I am with this thread. I never forget to switch the laundry, just simply don't do it. So I'm constantly washing everything at least twice. Of course, that's fine, as we have an infinite supply of both water and energy. So.
Speaking of bad smells in the laundry room, if you have a front loader, there is a little reservoir of really foul water that gets saved for some reason I can't recall. It's accessible by unscrewing a small cover at the bottom of the front of the machine (at least on mine). A small bit of the water will make anybody's car smell like a damp basement full of decomposing sheep.
My wife seems to believe that the answer to this question is "less than an hour". I pretty much believe that if you can't smell a problem, there is no problem. Fortunately for her, our fancy front-loader has a time-delay start, so you can put clothes in at night and have them just-finished washing when you wake up, so there's minimal delay between washer and dryer.
(I'm not sure how the front-loader issue works out. On the one hand, it spins clothes pretty dry already; on the other hand, it's closed when it's done, so there's even less opportunity for the damp clothes to air-dry.)
But won't your washing machine be all mildewy afterwards?
After more than 12 hours, I usually run the rinse cycle again.
My wife seems to believe that the answer to this question is "less than an hour".
I hate to say this, Nathan, but your wife is empirically wrong. However, if she has a definition of ookie which kicks in after an hour, there's little point arguing about it (see also 6 above).
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Will you people stop fucking shooting each other. That is all.
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24 hours is almost always okay. In cool months, my laundry has sat in the machine for up to 3 days and been okay after a dryer cycle or a day on the line. And, as mentioned above, a rinse cycle is usually enough to mend things even if it starts edging into ookie.
15: I predict that no, we will not stop.
You must, at a minimum, use color safe bleach on the clothes immediately, if you're not willing to ve rid of them. Mold isn't just a smell or grossness issue, it's a serious health problem of indoor air pollution. You have children in the house, right? Do this now.
When it comes to mold, I like to think of myself has being in the sensible middle between the Halford and urple views.
Has anyone else run into what seems to be the Zeno's paradox of laundry? We seem to split our laundry into so many color- or fabric-based loads that there are too many loads to do.
I stopped worrying about color-fastness for anything that's not being washed for the first time, and wash everything together in cold water.
I have found it totally depends on the location and season. In Santa Barbara, where it is always mild and always humid, we had to be super vigilant about mold and mildew year-round. In winter in a place where there is real winter, it was basically a non-issue.
Then the ass-germs in your underwear never get culled.
All my clothes tend towards some greyish blue color after enough washings. I consider this an advantage because it makes it harder to tell when I don't change from one day to the next.
18 was a joke/"conversation provoking nontruthful intervention"
27: Eggplant wants all his clothes to match his skin.
So it's harder to tell on the days when I don't wear anything.
Mold isn't just a smell or grossness issue, it's a serious health problem of indoor air pollution.
Our basement regularly floods during heavy rains and there's a lot of mold around the baseboards. I asked the maintenance person about it and she breezily assured me that you need a lot of mold for it to be dangerous. Maybe I should get a second opinion on that.
If it gets really bad, go to Germany and run it again. They have stuff in their detergent we don't allow, and it'll either clean your clothes completely or destroy them trying.
For the record, I put the laundry on the line right before I sent the guest post, so it had been in the washer for 24 hrs. This makes my clothing ookie by the standards of Mrs. Nathan, J Robot, and Halford but fine by everyone else.
It is quite humid here.
IMX, in a series of experiments designed to refine my ability to do wimmin's work, 24hrs is fine even using L.A. water carrying all sorts of nutrients molds love to munch on. Three days can get one an interesting science experiment though. Green stuff; it's not only for the back of the fridge.
33: All their laundromats also advertise KOCHWÄSCHE, and I have had more than one German roommate who insisted that my aversion to boiling my clothes meant that they were still dirty. Most people also don't have dryers, so the question there is how long the clothes can sit in the washer before you put them on the drying rack.
We also have a washer but no dryer in our Cambridge apartment (not out of environmentalism, we just don't have a dryer hookup in the apartment), which has on occasion provoked some really weird reactions along the lines of, "But what do you do?" Half of our kitchen is taken up by drying clothes at any given moment, that's what we do.
Here's it been so dry and hot than by the time you finishing hanging the clothes on the line, the first clothes you hung are already dry.
I'd rewash clothes that were in the washer for more than a few hours, but I hate mold and mildew more than spiders.
My vote: they're fine until they start to smell. If that happens, rewash with a cup (some right-seeming amount) of Borax, which is a miraculous product indeed.
Don't mind us hauling in the heat. We've got nothing better to do.
Maybe watch TV and have a couple of brews?
I asked the maintenance person about it and she breezily assured me that you need a lot of mold for it to be dangerous. Maybe I should get a second opinion on that.
Well, at least she didn't try to gull you into thinking it was only mildew. Perhaps you could ask her to KOCH(WÄSCHE) it anyway, just in case.
Maybe I should get a second opinion on that.
Or maybe get someone to just go ahead and cock it.
All penis joking aside, if you have a basement that floods regularly, you probably shouldn't have baseboards in the basement.
36: Do all the apartments have those drying racks on pulleys in the kitchen that one hauls up to the ceiling?
I want a kitchen that can be hauled up to the ceiling.
along the lines of, "But what do you do?" Half of our kitchen is taken up by drying clothes at any given moment, that's what we do.
Can't you run a line to the next building over, 27 stories high in the sky, both on little wheels, and wear a bonnet over your hair and have a ruddy complexion and hang your clothes outside like a proper scullery maid? (I think I'm having some old-timey drift there.)
Just build a big open fire in a trash can in the kitchen, hang fans from the ceiling, and use the fans to vent the hot air over the pile of wet clothes.
45 In Poland it's the bathroom that has the racks. A pain in the ass and your clothes end up all stiff.
Another option: use a sledgehammer to beat the wetness out of the clothes.
Why would the clothes be stiffer having dried in the bathroom?
You could also buy 30 or so large salad spinners and rig up some kind of weights and pullies operation to have them all spinning at once.
It doesn't matter where they're dried, it's just that line drying leaves clothes stiff and rough compared to a tumble drier. The worst are old school Euro electric driers which consist of a big metal closet with racks, and then fans which blow hot air onto the clothes. Towels come out feeling like sandpaper covered cardboard.
53: Got it. I sort of like that line-dried crispness in my shirts. I dry them on plastic hangers as we have a bar above the washer and dryer. I put the towels in the dryer like a normal human.
Does the line-dried stiffness depend on the hardness of the water? I've rarely lived anywhere it seemed like a problem, partly because our line-drying weather is generally breezy and warm and everything becomes crisp and flower-scented, la la la, the weather in Berkeley is perfect for me right now.
My mother would dry my bedsheets outside on the line and it was like the best thing ever.
Do all the apartments have those drying racks on pulleys in the kitchen that one hauls up to the ceiling?
I've never seen one of those! But I've seen a few of those ones that open out over the bathtub from a closet in the wall. I have owned this drying rack both in Germany and in the U.S., linked here by me before because it is so frikkin' awesome. You can fit way more clothes on there than you think. The worse thing about air drying clothes is that your t-shirts eventually become shapeless. I have to dry them in a machine at least once in a while.
Cheap - they range from about ten to fifteen bucks.
Doesn't an over-bathtub clothes rack make it hard to take a bath? It takes more than 12 hours to dry thicker fabrics.
I'll rinse mine again if it's been a few hours, and would rewash after about 12 I expect. After 24 it would definitely smell a bit, but perhaps that's just my old machine. I got a new one yesterday, could experiment.
Baths are fine since the clothes are right up by the ceiling. Showers might be a problem but most Polish apartments don't have mounted showers, just the hand held kind.
Somebody should make a joke about how Polish people are less efficient at washing their hair because they need to use one hand to hold the shower.
Two people-- one to hold the shower and the other to move the head* around.
*Joke attempt semi-defeated by shower heads being called shower heads.
55: Our water isn't exceptionally hard, but the air is pretty still. I think that's why our clothes come off the line stiffly here.
66: an alternate hypothesis! Old laundry descriptions include snapping things a couple of times as they come off the line -- I wonder if that softened them up a little. (It removes any slumbering bees, so.)