Friday, July 31 · 7 min read
There is a particular annoyance in drying off with a towel that pushes water around instead of taking it. Your towel is not worn out if it’s doing this though. Odds are good it’s coated, and the thing coating it is sitting in your laundry cupboard right now.
Below: the fix that costs a cup of vinegar, the weekend job behind roughly 2,900 dryer fires a year, the grill brush worth throwing away today, the silent leak that shows up on your water bill, and the ten minutes to spend before you leave for a week. Reply and tell us what is on your August list, we read every one.
Why Your Towels Stopped Absorbing
Fabric softener.
That is the answer, and it is worth knowing exactly how it works, because the mechanism explains the rest.
Softener makes fabric feel soft by coating the fibers in a thin, waxy, silicone-based film. On a shirt that film is doing its job. On a towel, the same film is waterproofing, and absorbing water is the towel's entire purpose. You’ve basically been slowly laminating your towels.
It happens a layer at a time, which is why nobody notices the day it goes wrong. A towel that was excellent two years ago now smears, and it feels like the towel wore out rather than something you did to it.
Dryer sheets get there by a different route. They melt a similar coating onto the fabric in the heat of the drum. They also leave a film on the lint screen, which is why a screen that looks perfectly clean can still be strangling the airflow through your dryer.
It is the same reason to keep softener away from athletic wear and microfiber. The film blocks the wicking the fabric was engineered to do, and it traps odor in the fibers instead of letting it wash out.
The fix is free, and it is two cycles with no detergent in either.
Hot water, no detergent
One cup of plain white vinegar poured into the fabric softener dispenser. The acid dissolves the waxy residue.
Hot water again, no detergent and no vinegar this time
Half a cup of baking soda tipped straight into the drum. It lifts what the vinegar loosened and takes the musty smell out with it.
Do not put the vinegar and the baking soda in together. They neutralize each other, you get a fizzing drum and a wasted hour, and the towels come out exactly as they went in.
Then dry on medium rather than high, because high heat cooks cotton fibers brittle over time. And stop using softener on towels from here. If you want them soft, wool dryer balls do it mechanically by separating the fabric in the drum, and they leave nothing behind.
One more habit worth breaking: use less detergent than the cap suggests. Excess detergent does not fully rinse out of a dense cotton loop, and it stiffens towels the same way the softener slicks them.
This Weekend: Clean the Dryer Vent, Not Just the Lint Trap
This is the highest-consequence hour of maintenance in the house, and almost nobody does it. There are roughly 2,900 dryer fires a year in the US, and failure to clean is the leading cause. The same blockage is also why your towels need two cycles to dry.
Unplug the dryer. If it is gas, shut the gas valve too, and be gentle with the flexible connector behind it.
Pull the dryer out and loosen the clamp holding the duct to the outlet on the back. Twist the duct free.
Vacuum both ends, the dryer's own outlet and the mouth of the duct. Most of the lint you will find lives in the first foot.
Run a flexible brush through the duct, ideally starting from the outside vent and working in. If it is a drill-driven kit, run the drill clockwise only. In reverse, the rods unscrew and you leave a brush head stranded inside a wall.
Go outside, open the vent hood, and clear the flap. Birds nest in these. So does a solid felt mat of lint that has been building since you moved in.
Reconnect, clamp it, and push the dryer back without crushing the duct into an S behind it. Run 15 minutes on air fluff, then go outside and feel the airflow. It should be obvious.
While you are back there, look at what the duct is made of. If it is white vinyl or thin foil accordion hose, replace it. It sags, every ridge catches lint, and it burns. Rigid or semi-rigid metal only, on as short and straight a run as the room allows.
Once a year is right for most homes. Twice if you run more than about ten loads a week, have pets, or have a long duct run to an outside wall.
Last thing, and it connects to the section above: wash the lint screen in hot water with a soft brush. If water pools on the mesh instead of running straight through, that is dryer sheet residue, and it has been throttling every load you have run this year.
Clean the Grill Grates Without the Wire Brush
Throw the wire-bristle brush away. A 2016 study estimated about 1,700 emergency room visits from wire grill brush injuries between 2002 and 2014, and roughly one in four of those people were admitted to hospital.
Why? A bristle breaks off, stays stuck to the grate, transfers to food on the next cook, and gets swallowed. The injuries cluster in the back of the mouth and the throat, which is why they land people in surgery rather than in a waiting room.
What to use instead, cheapest first.
Aluminum foil. Ball up a sheet, grip it in long tongs, and scrub the hot grate. It is free, it is in your kitchen already, and it works about as well as anything.
A wooden grill scraper, around $15-40. It burns its own grooves to match your grate profile after two or three uses and then fits perfectly.
A bristle-free coil brush, a tight stainless spring instead of loose bristles, so there is nothing that can shed.
A pumice grill stone for heavy carbon buildup, which is the one that handles a grate nobody has touched all season.
The method matters more than the tool. Run the grill on high with the lid down for 10 to 15 minutes before you touch it. Carbonized residue turns to grey ash and comes away with almost no pressure.
Scraping a cold, sticky grate is what makes brushes shed bristles in the first place.
Finish by wiping the bars with a folded paper towel held in tongs and a little high-smoke-point oil. It seasons the metal and keeps the next cook from welding itself on.
If you are keeping a wire brush regardless, check the grate carefully after every clean, and replace the brush the moment the bristles start looking ragged.
The Bill Cutter: The Toilet You Cannot Hear Running
A leaking flapper is the most expensive silent failure in a house, and the test for it is free and takes ten minutes of waiting.
Lift the tank lid off, put a few drops of food coloring into the tank water, and do not flush. Come back in ten minutes and look in the bowl. Color in the bowl means water is slipping past the flapper and straight down the drain. The faster it shows up, the worse the leak. Hardware stores sell dye tablets for this, but food coloring does the same job.
The scale is the part that surprises people. A slow leak runs somewhere around 30 gallons a day. A bad one climbs into the hundreds. A flapper that has warped badly enough to sit open can pass a thousand gallons or more, all of it silent, all of it on your bill. Water utilities run public campaigns about this every spring for exactly that reason.
Why they fail: a flapper is a piece of rubber that lives underwater. It hardens, it warps, and eventually it stops seating properly. Drop-in bleach tablets speed that up considerably, which is a good reason to skip them.
The fix is a universal flapper, $6 to $12, and about ten minutes. Shut the supply valve behind the toilet, flush to empty the tank, unhook the chain, and slide the old flapper off the two ears at the base of the overflow tube. The new one goes on the same way.
Set the chain with a small amount of slack, roughly half a link. Pulled tight, it holds the flapper fractionally open and you have rebuilt the leak you just fixed. Then run the dye test again to confirm.
The Smart Buy: The Kit That Does Saturday's Job
For the dryer vent job above, the tool we would point you to is the Holikme 30 Foot Dryer Vent Cleaner Kit, around $20 on Amazon.
It is flexible nylon rods that screw together end to end, a synthetic brush head, and a drill adapter, so you can turn it by hand or hand the work to a cordless drill. Bob Vila's testing named it the longest reach in the category. Thirty feet covers essentially any residential duct run, including a basement dryer venting up through a floor and out a rim joist.
Make sure you run the drill clockwise only. The rods are threaded, and reverse rotation unscrews them mid-duct. If that makes you nervous, wrap each joint with a turn of electrical tape before you start. It takes two minutes and removes the problem entirely.
Start smaller if your run is short. If the dryer backs onto an outside wall with under about six feet of duct, the 15 foot version of the same kit does the same job for a few dollars less, and it’s easier to store.
Affiliate note: The Home Wire may earn a commission if you buy through our link, at no extra cost to you.
Always Do This: The Ten Minutes Before You Leave for Vacation
August is the big vacation stretch, and an empty house fails in predictable ways. The whole list takes ten minutes.
Shut the water off. The main valve if you can find it, or at minimum the two washing machine valves and the ice maker line. A burst supply hose is the most expensive thing that happens to empty houses, and it is the item on this list people skip.
Put the water heater on vacation mode, or turn the dial to its lowest setting. Nobody is home to use hot water and it has been holding 40 gallons at temperature for nothing.
Set the thermostat to about 85, not off. Off in August means coming home to a humid house and whatever has been growing in it since Tuesday.
Unplug what draws power and makes heat for no reason. Leave the fridge alone.
Put one or two lamps on cheap timers, on different schedules so they do not both click at once.
Hold the mail - you need to request this at the post office or ask a neighbor to collect it.
Photograph the electricity meter on your way out the door. If something ran the entire week, you will know exactly what it cost and roughly when it started.
The one people skip is the water. It is also the one that costs the most.
One quick tap: Which should we cover next?
Which should we cover next?
That is the reason your towels gave up, the vent worth an hour this weekend, the brush to bin today, the leak to dye-test tonight, and ten minutes that protect an empty house.
Reply and tell us what is on your August list, or forward this to whoever in your family still buys fabric softener by the gallon. See you Monday.
The Home Wire
Affiliate disclosure: The Home Wire earns a commission on some links in this email, at no extra cost to you. We only recommend products we believe earn their place in your home.
This is a marketing email from The Home Wire. {{address_text}}. You're receiving this because you signed up for The Home Wire. Unsubscribe and Manage preferences, one click, no questions asked.