Acing the laundry pile

Laundry is my least favourite job around the house. I’d rather clean the bathroom and do a hundred dishes than sort, wash and hang out the dirty laundry. I only have one child and yet it seems to have created ten times as much laundry as previous, so how anyone with multiples manages I simply do not know. It’s not just the quantity of the clothes, it’s the quality of the stains he manages to accrue. I have a very rambunctious toddler. He is into everything and it seems like everything gets transferred to his clothes. Apparently dressing a toddler all in black to hide the fact he just tipped an entire bottle of tomato ketchup on himself isn’t acceptable, so instead I find myself staring glumly at the mountain of laundry and trying to figure out exactly what he did all day when I wasn’t around by the telltale stains. Mud, ketchup, blueberries, raspberries, that terrible time my mother gave him beetroot, yogurt, milk, crayon, paint that claimed it was washable but lied, baby poop… sound familiar?

My son is now starting nursery and they do messy play, so you can imagine the state his clothes get in. He takes two sets of clothes in with him every day and they both get dirty! I’m already having nightmares about the mounds of school shirts and jumpers to come…

So when I was contacted by Britmums to try the Ace For School challenge I thought it was a perfect fit for me as our family is just starting our school journey. I was intrigued as to whether it could actually take some of the stress out of laundry by getting rid of stains.

Ace for Colours, as the name suggests, isn’t a bleach for whites – it actually works on all the laundry. It can be used on colours, whites and delicates, and can be used on silk, wool and cashmere too so it means I don’t have to be too picky with sorting. I do sort my colours from my whites generally, but something always gets mixed in, and I don’t separate my clothes from school clothes so it’s good to not have to separate by fabric type as I do everything on my washing machine’s mixed setting. I’ll be honest, my husband has had to throw away the odd pink pair of underwear as well.

I tested two products, the main Ace washing liquid which you pop into your washing machine, and also the multi purpose spray which can be sprayed directly onto clothes as a stain remover.

I had a very heavily stained white top which was covered in the dreaded strawberry juice, orange squash and a healthy coating of mud. After the first wash, most of the stains were gone, but there was still a patch of yellow remaining. Usually I’d hang it out in the sunshine to get rid of yellow stains, but since I live in Wales and the sun has apparently disappeared for the rest of the year, that didn’t seem like a good option. I therefore gave it another go, this time soaking it for 5 minutes in the spray first and this time, result, it’s gone and very clean – bright and white again! So very stubborn stains – or stains that are layered on top of each other (the testament to a toddler having a very busy day!) may take soaking pre-wash. In future I’d remember to do this first so it would only need one wash.

Ace is also pretty handy for general cleaning. You can mix one cap of ACE with 5 litres of water and you have a general cleaning agent that will be tough on stains on any surface. I even got them off my sofa!

Anything that makes my life easier is a bonus for me. The fact that I don’t need to sort the laundry precisely, that I can use this on colours and whites, that I can also use it for both fabric stains around the house and for general cleaning if I want are all big advantages. I live in a small flat and we don’t have masses of space for 6 billion different products so one that has multiple purposes is perfect. But the most important thing of all is that it did get the stains out and it did clean well. Because I received my ACE free of charge to take part in this challenge, I was a bit worried it would be expensive but it’s currently in my local supermarket at £2 and cheaper than the stain remover I’ve used in the past so of course, I bought some more!

How do you get the stains out of your children’s clothes?

This post is an entry for the BritMums #ACEforSchool Challenge, sponsored by ACE. Get help for all kinds of stains with the ACE Stain Helper. http://www.acecleanuk.co.uk/ or to buy head to your local Tesco’s, Morrison’s, Waitrose or Sainsbury’s.