Following the prior Lemmy post about towels…
I wash once a week, is that sufficient or need I more frequency?
(me… Washing them every 3-4 weeks and reading the comments.)
Me at 8 weeks wondering what all the fuss is about.
Also, never ever ever use fabric softener on towels. It ruins them by covering them in an oily thin compound that nullifies their ability to absorb water. And it takes so much work and many washings to fix them.
I wish I could make my wife understand this :-(
Once a week is normal, unless you notice a funk. How wet they get, how you hang them, and how well they dry can be factors in this. 
Which towels are we talking about, and how frequently do they get used?
Bath towels, hand towels and dish drying towels will all get dirty at different rates, and get/stay wet at different rates.
Towels should smell clean (clean, not perfumy) and be dry and not feel like they’ve got something on them. The more time a towel stays wet, the more often you wash it. If it gets noticeably dirty, you wash it. This could be anywhere from once a day to never, if it’s just decorative and you never use it.
Relevant Dilbert:
I’m confused and pleased that this one strip from twenty eight years ago also lives in somebody else’s head
This is the first thing that comes to my mind when someone mentions towel washing frequency.
“Are towels supposed to bend?” Is one of my all time favourites haha.
That and the part in the cartoon where Wally’s so sick he’s turning into a fly and everyone comes clean about trading him their vacation days. “They’re non-transferable!” “-Sad buzz-”
I’ll agree.
I also wash them once a week
Me too. And I use a face towel instead of a full sized one so that I can wash it more frequently if I need, and it’s taking half the space in the washer. Maybe with long hair it wouldn’t be big enough, but for me it works.
How often should you, I cannot tell. I do it when it’s no longer white, and the idea of using it starts to seem repulsive. This strategy has worked for over a decade.
I wash towels one week and sheets the next. Everything is on and alternating cycle.
When I was a kid, it was one and done. I grabbed a clean towel from the bathroom closet every day. Even though I was clean coming out of the shower, I also knew that showering loosens dead skin cells, which I was rubbing all over the towel. Over time, those skin cells would decompose, giving off a musty smell. I learned that from my dad, who almost never changed his towel. Ick. It made me extra paranoid about reusing them, so I swapped towels daily.
When I became an adult and had to do my own laundry, I realized just how miserable it was trying to wash 7 towels every week. (Why did my mother let me use so many towels as a kid?!) So I started reusing them. I used a towel for a week before throwing it in the laundry.
Now, I’m recently retired in my late 30s and shower every 2-3 days (or anytime I leave the house). Since I’m not showering as frequently, I will reuse a towel for about 2-3 weeks before replacing it. If I go to dry off after a shower and the towel smells a bit musty, I’ll toss it on the floor and grab a fresh towel instead. I think I’m on week 4 with my current towel, but it still smells clean, so I’m not too worried about getting a few more showers out of it.
this makes me wonder how much longer a towel could be used if it were promptly dried after use, rather than put up on a hook where some of it dries sorta and the rest of it clumps.
This is probably a key factor.
I’m only using the towel to dry off when I’m clean from showering, I use it at least a week. I do hang it from a rack where it dries well.
even when you are clean from showering, you are still covered in delicious skin, refreshing moisture, and things that thrive in the presence of both.
Once a week is fine. You’re clean when you get out of the shower, and the towel air-dries as you’re not using it. Even where I live - 65% humidity year-round - we only wash the towels once a week.
Proper air-drying is key. Gotta maximize the surface area. If there’s a gentle breeze nearby, all the better.
Living somewhere where you can use a clothesline would fit this most times (ie, if it’s not raining all the time).
Just to add to the answers here, remember to strip your towels once a year. That funky smell when they’re dry may be your delicious human oils penetrating deep and impregnating the fibers. Sebum rots and goes rancid, producing that musty closet smell.
What does ‘strip’ mean in this context? (not a native speaker)
I’m a native speaker and I don’t know either.
“Laundry stripping is a soaking process where you’re removing the built-up residue: excess laundry detergent, fabric softener, body oils, hard-water minerals… It’s something you do on towels that are already clean, not dirty.”
“Fill a bathtub with hot water and add a quarter-cup of borax, a quarter-cup of washing soda (a.k.a. sodium carbonate) and a half-cup of detergent. Soak clean towels until the water cools (at least an hour), stirring occasionally. Then run the linens through the rinse cycle in your washing machine and dry them. Make sure to do this separately for lights and darks.”
“Add an optional one to two small boxes of baking soda (especially if you have hard water) to soften and deodorize fabrics. You can also add more borax — up to a cup — if the laundry is moldy or musty.”
Just put in a scoop of oxyclean.
I didn’t know either but I just looked it up. It says to soak towels in a borax solution in a bathtub or a bucket
I’d generally heard ‘laundry stripping’ used to refer to a vinegar soak/rinse, followed by a baking soda cycle to further neutralize. The idea being laundry soap/detergent is basic and some things build up and don’t dissolve. Added borax was an alternative ‘laundry booster’ that made this unnecessary, as I’d heard it.
But, it sounds like there’s some variability to how the terms are used and for some a borax rinse is a stripping process. Understandable, as the end result is pretty much the same.
You can also avoid this problem by adding a little borax to your laundry, particularly if you have hard water.
3/4 c Stain Solver per load for the most cost effective solution. Has the most borax percent by weight. We order the 50lb tub and it lasts months. I’m not a shill, I promise! If we don’t use it for every load, our hard Colorado River water makes the laundry smell like ass.
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I thought I was going crazy here. I have a clothes hamper and a towels hamper. Towel goes in hamper after use. Load of towels gets washed when the hamper is full.
I guess it’d fill up a lot quicker if I had kids, and that’d become a problem.
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I usually go for once a week to once every two weeks. But I do have a heated towel dryer, and k think that helps to keep bacteria to grow in them. My advice is to make sure you hang your towl somewhere they can air out well
