It’s in the Bag

By Jeff Gardner | Feb 10, 2011

Every once in a while at my coin laundry, we’ll receive a wash-dry-fold order that includes several small, separate bags of laundry. Each bag will have about five to 10 pieces in it – usually socks, T-shirts, etc. And, of course, the bags will invariably include a mixture of white and colored items.

To wash all of these small but separate orders efficiently, we rely on color-coded mesh bags. For instance, with the whites, we’ll take Customer #1’s whites and put them in a yellow mesh bag. Customer #2’s whites will go into a green mesh bag. Customer #3’s whites will be placed in a red mesh bag. And so on.

This way, we can wash all of those whites together in one load.

However, what’s critical to understand about the mesh bag process is that you never want to overload a bag. Putting more than about a pound or two of laundry in a mesh bag is a mistake.

The reason is twofold. First of all, mesh bags reduce the mechanical action of the washer on the garments, which in turn reduces the cleaning ability. Therefore, by overstuffing a mesh bag, you’re reducing that mechanical cleaning action even more.

Secondly, by placing a large number of clothes into a mesh bag, you will be wearing out the bearings on your machine a lot quicker. After all, when that machine goes into the extract cycle, those mesh bags could wind up situated in odd places and create an out-of-balance situation inside the drum, which puts undue stress on the bearings because more of the weight is sitting on one side of the drum. If you do this consistently over time, you will shorten the life of your bearings significantly.

That said, mesh bags are a great tool for handling such small orders.

In addition, because they reduce the mechanical action on the garments, they’re helpful for preventing wrinkling and pilling.

Let’s say you have a garment that tends to pill – a polyester shirt, a sweater, etc. How do you wash these items with other garments and prevent them from creating damage? You can protect them from rubbing up against something that will create this pilling action by individually bagging these garments.

Mesh bags allow us to do a variety of different garments and wash them with other items. The bags also enable us to launder group orders, where there may be a lot of smaller loads. Above all, they help us to run our drop-off laundry service more efficiently and to provide a quality product for our wash-dry-fold customers.

(Don’t miss Jeff Gardner’s “The Laundry Doctor” column, which appears each month in PlanetLaundry magazine.)