Don't you hate it when your favorite t-shirt comes out
of the laundry shrunken like this?
Hi, I'm James Dickerson.
And I'm the chief scientific officer for Consumer Reports.
And I love science.
It's part of my everyday life, even when I do mundane things
like the laundry.
In fact, at home, I'm the chief laundry officer.
You spend a lot of money on your clothes.
So you want to make sure you protect your Investment.
So the first thing I do when I wash my clothes is I
try to sort them out.
Whites in this basket.
I have some darks, so I put them separately
from say another dark that is all cotton, denim.
Oh, here's a delicate all cotton sweater.
The problem is, is that it has very fine details
and you want to preserve them.
So imagine this heavy denim and this light delicate cotton
smashed together.
It's probably not a good idea.
So I'm going to wash this completely, separately from all
of these other clothes.
Why do clothes shrink?
So clothes made out of natural fibers like cotton and wool,
when they are harvested are pulled out into long fibers.
Those are eventually turned into textiles.
So when those textiles are heated,
when you're washing or drying them,
they want to return back to their natural state, hence
the shrinkage.
To avoid shrinkage, avoid overheating.
So now that we've finished all of our sorting,
it's time to put them in the laundry.
Now, one word about jeans, people can spend a lot of money
on them so to protect their color, their texture,
their sheen, the best thing to do
is try to wash them inside out.
That way the inside surface takes the beating, not
the colored surface.
And now I'm going to pick the setting that's
best for this load.
We're now at a very critical stage in the washer and dryer
process.
Because the clothes are wet, they're
easy to distend, distort, and change their shape and contour.
One thing that happens often is that as it's
going through the tumbling process,
it all gets twisted up.
So one thing that I often do is that I spin the tub
around helping me loosen them up until some clothes that
were all tied together now come out a lot easier.
So now we're ready to dry our clothes.
The thing you want to keep in mind
is that you want to use the least amount of time
and the least amount of heat.
So you have to decide whether you're
going to tumble dry, hang dry, or flat dry.
So let's take a look at the care label.
So you can see here, it says that I can actually dry it.
So I'm now going to put this one in the dry pile.
Some things need to be air dried, like this wool sweater.
Air drying or flat drying is a process that allows water
to evaporate without use of direct heat, which
can cause distortions in not only the shape, the size,
but even the surface texture of the sweater.
So let's pop these into the dryer.
One of the best things to do is to use the sensor mode
on your dryer.
It will actually determine how much time
and how much heat is absolutely necessary to make sure
your clothes are safe after you get them out of the dryer.
Hey, our clothes are dry.
All right, so this nice shirt up on the hanger.
Now we have a t-shirt.
Let's go ahead and fold that, perfect.
And ah-h, look at those socks.
One of the cool things about science
is that you get to solve mysteries.
And one of the greatest mysteries in the universe
is, where's the matching sock?
You take them out of the dryer, and they
get lost into the universe.
The culprit is a likely static electricity.
So static electricity occurs when your fabrics are inside
the tumble dryer rubbing against each other.
That causes charges, particularly electrons.
And they end up sticking on fabrics.
They get caught in nooks and crannies
and end up being mysteriously missing.
So be sure to check your clothes for any sock stowaways.
And that's how you do your laundry like a scientist.