Fiber family
Mixed Loads
The other four pages describe fibers. This one describes what most households actually put in the machine.
What this fiber is
A mixed load is a load whose contents belong to more than one of the four fiber families on this site, washed together because sorting further was not worth the time. It is not a fiber type and no Extension bulletin describes it. It is included here because every conflict on this site is easier to hit in a mixed load than in a sorted one, and because pretending households sort perfectly would make the rest of this site useless.
What each product class does here
- Dye-trapping sheets
- This is the situation the Shout Color Catcher listing is written for: it states that its sheets trap loose dye and allow mixed whites and colors in one load. That claim is about dye loose in the water and about nothing else in this list.
- Enzyme boosters
- A booster added to a mixed load is added to every item in it, including whatever protein fiber wandered in. The decision to use it covers the whole drum, which is the reason the wool and silk page recommends separating rather than deciding.
- Chlorine bleach
- University of Georgia Extension names four fabric groups chlorine bleach can be used on and names exceptions, and directs the reader to the care label of each item. A mixed load is a load where that instruction has to hold for every garment at once.
- Detergent sheets
- Sheet listings state load counts, and a load count says nothing about what is in the load. Two of the listings on this site count small loads separately from loads, which is the closest any of them come to describing contents.
- Fabric softener
- Softener added by habit to a mixed load reaches the technical garment nobody remembered was in there. That is how the pairing on the technical fabrics page usually happens.
What damages it permanently
Everything named on the other four pages applies here, in whichever combination the drum happens to contain: alkaline soaps and high temperatures on animal fiber, retained chlorine weakening and yellowing a finish, heat on a heat-sensitive synthetic, lost elastane recovery. University of Georgia Extension is the source for each of those individually. What a mixed load adds is that a single decision now covers items with four different sets of limits, and the item with the tightest limit is the one that pays.
This site gives no instructions for rescuing an item that has already been damaged. That is a job for the garment maker or a professional cleaner, and guessing at it here would be worse than saying nothing.
Conflicts that land here
- Color Catcher and What It Does Not DoA dye-trapping sheet is not a stain remover and is not a cleaning product. Where a garment care label says wash separately, the sheet does not overrule it.
- Enzymes and Protein FibersA published review of wool processing states that protease enzymes degrade proteins and have been applied deliberately to wool fiber, in one case with substantial fiber damage. The garment care label decides whether an enzyme product goes near it.