A washing machine makes your laundry day hassle-free.
Depending on the type of machine just dump your clothes in it and after some time it will come clean and stain-free out.
If you have a washing machine at home then you must have looked at the various settings on it.
Suppose you read wash, rinse and spin settings on it
Now your curiosity has awakened and you ask
What is the difference between wash and rinse or wash or spin cycle.
How long do these cycles go?
What is the purpose of them?
Let’s know
The washing machine goes through mainly 3 steps – wash, rinse, spin. Wash cycle washes the clothes with water+detergent. Rinse cycle washes the cloth with only water. In the spin cycle, the drum spins at high speed to remove as much water out of the clothes as possible
1. Soak
This is the first step in washing a machine(all types). In this, the clothes are allowed to soak in water and detergent solution.
No agitation of clothes is performed here.
This allows the detergent to penetrate the pores of fabric so when agitation starts the dirt comes out easily.
2. Wash
Violent movement or agitation starts in the washing machine
The clothes soiled in detergent solution moves to and fro
Depending on the degree of dirtiness of clothes the agitation or wash cycle goes for a period of time
The detergent cleans the fabric by combining with the dirt molecules
3. Rinse
In this cycle, the clothes are washed with clean water.
No detergent is used here
After the wash cycle, the water has become dirty from the dirt and detergent solution
This dirty water is drained out from the washing machine and clean water is added.
Agitation again starts but this time without detergent. With this, the clothes release the remaining dirt.
4. Spin
In this, the drum of the washing machine spins at a high speed without any addition of water.
Due to centrifugal force, clothes release water.
This is also called the dry cycle.
Clothes come dry after the spin cycle.
Putting the clothes in the sunlight for a few minutes to hours will make them completely dry
The speed of the spinning drum is measured in RPM.
Higher the RPM faster the clothes will dry.
If you can see several speed settings on your washing machine.
Then you can choose a faster speed setting for making the dry or spin cycle shorter.
However, you should take caution for delicate clothes and choose a slow spin speed. At a high spin speed, the delicate fabric can get damaged.
A fast spin speed is perfect for heavy fabrics like denim or a towel
In the case of a semi-automatic washing machine, you have separate tubs for washing and spinning
What is “Rinse + Spin” Setting
This is a 2 step process in which the clothes first go in a rinse cycle without detergent and then in a spin cycle to remove most of the moisture out of it.
When you may require this setting?
Imagine if someday you decided you want to wash your clothes by hand.
If you have delicate clothes you may hand wash them, this is soft on clothes and does the least damage at the microscopic or fiber level.
After hand washing, you can put your delicate clothes inside the washing machine and turn ON the “rinse + spin” cycle
The machine will use regular water without detergent to simply rinse the laundry and then spin to dry the clothes.
Or you can think of a scenario when you got wet due to rain. You came home and changed your clothes
But what about the wet clothes
Simply put it inside the “rinse+spin” cycle of the washing machine.
What is “Drain + Spin” Setting
This can be simply thought of like a spin cycle where your clothes come out dry after wash.
The excess water is drained out and then the spin cycle starts which spins the clothes at a high speed.
The aim of this cycle is to get as much water out of the clothes as possible
