Some time back i tried to figure out the answer to a simple question. How much detergent to use ?
The recommendations by the detergent powder manufacturers is they want you to use a whole scoop for a full load. The scoop is 60 gm for front loader detergent. When i tried this i always found a strong detergent perfume in the clothes after washing and i wondered whether i was over doing it but how to tell.
The trick is to run an empty hot wash and at the end of the wash cycle observe how much detergent is in the water. You need to catch this just before the rinse cycle starts as the water will be drained out at that point and you will have to wait until the next wash.
Usually the water is foamy as it has been agitated but the key here is the foam should dissipate after a few seconds. If it does then all is fine if it does not then it means you're overdoing the detergent as there is residue in the machine that is coming out. This is a waste of detergent. I noticed i had a bit of foam that didn't go away.
So i started reducing by 5gm each wash until i felt the clothes were clean ie no stains or odour and a faint perfume. I ended up with 20gm dosage for a full load and have been using that ever since. This works for me at medium soil. If heavily soiled then i use 30gms but that's it.
Then i ran a few empty washes until the foam dissipated as mentioned above. It required at least five tub cleans on hot to get the desired result and its been holding like that every month when i do a maintenance wash.
The result is 1kg of detergent lasts as long as four months now instead of just over a month.
This may not work for every one as you may live in a much more humid environment than i do or have harder water. So definitely YMMV.
What i've read people say is as a general guideline, HALVE what the detergent manufacturer recommends and then either adjust up or down as appropriate. 60gm is for heavily soiled clothes and hard water. In other words, worst case scenario (!) These companies want to make money so using more of their product is definitely recommended. The scoops provided have no graduations so its difficult to guess how much to use or even what half is but ofc easy to do one full scoop. So i use a smaller scoop that i know is 10gm. not found a 20gm one yet.
The dosage recommended is some national average based on hard water, hot humid temperature and then just a little more so that people don't think the soap is bad. In the tropics the perfumes used are quite strong as they have to counter sweat so acceptable means it comes out stinking of perfume and this is considered correct. Henko is god awful for this.
