(upbeat music)
- Most of our testing
had to do with these lovely things called stain strips.
These specific stains might not be common for you,
but they are representative of people's common stains.
This stain is wine.
This stain is cocoa,
which is a combination of milk and chocolate.
This one is pig's blood.
I'd recommend all Wirecutter staffers to give it a sniff.
(Sarah laughs)
This is carbon black,
which is a mixture of soot and mineral oil.
And this is sebum,
which is all of the stuff that seeps out of your pores,
like your sweat.
And then this is the control.
So we pin these onto a shirt,
run them in all of the different wash cycles
in the laundry that we want to test,
which is delicate, quick, heavy duty, and normal.
Once the cycles complete, we take it off the shirt
and we let it dry.
And so it comes out looking kind of like this.
This is an example of our top pick
on the normal cycle.
As you can see, it's not completely clean,
but these things aren't designed to be completely clean.
They're designed to show you the differences
between wash cycles.
If all the stains came out,
there'd be nothing to measure.
We read the stains with this lovely color reader.
Put it on,
press the button,
and then you have some numbers.
And these numbers actually correlate to a specific color.
And then we'll put it in an equation.
We will calculate the stain removal index,
which just gives us a number that we can use
to compare the different stains swatches.
But we also compare them visually.
So nothing beats the human eye.
I'm just kidding.
(upbeat music)
So these are our fraying fabrics
that have gone through the wash already
for various different machines we tested so far.
The reason we do this is to test
how gentle the cycle is on your clothes.
You can see on this one, it's very stringy.
It's falling apart.
That's because this particular machine and cycle was rough.
The longer the strings are on these swatches,
the rougher the cycle was on your clothes.
If you look at this one,
you can tell that the strings are really short,
so there wasn't a lot of pulling.
You can see here that this was a delicate cycle.
So it checks out why these are so short.
And this was a heavy duty cycle.
So you can tell the difference right there.
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This is what we call our polka dot fabric.
It starts out looking kind of like this,
it's actually covered in a bunch of raised dots.
So when it rubs up against other clothing in a wash load,
the dots will fall off,
if there's a lot of friction.
And just like the fraying fabric,
we put the polka dot fabric
into each machine on each different setting that we tested.
This guy went through a lot inside the washer
and that's why all his dots are missing.
This was actually a heavy duty cycle,
so this makes sense.
This one was a delicate cycle,
so barely anything came off.
We pin these to a T-shirt,
so they don't fold in the laundries.
And to measure these,
we actually scan them using the scanner upstairs
and use a special software
to analyze how many dots were missing.
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