Over the winter holidays, we bought an EnergyStar washer and dryer. Clothes that come out of the washing machine are supposed to be clean, but they haven’t been.

Life with a baby is dirty. I go through several shirts a day, even though I try to have a burp cloth with me at all times. Our son is a spitter.

That spit has been the source of my washing machine issues — it does not come out! I’ve taken to scrubbing the spit splotches before throwing them in the wash, which is waste of my time.

I mentioned this to my mother, and then mentioned that we have the washing machine set on tap cold, except for the occasional bleach washing. She gave me a look, (I get this look a lot) and said that of course my clothes weren’t going to get clean if I wash them in cold water.

The Carbon Conscious Consumer recommends that you wash four out of five loads in cold water. This should really cut down on energy use and be kinder to your clothes. But it can’t be beneficial to wash most clothes 2-3 times to get spit-up out.

I’m guessing that spit up must be one of the more difficult things to get off clothes? And we can’t use the Tide that’s formulated for cold water until our boys are little older.

The only good news here is that I have a warm button, so I don’t have to get the water scalding hot for most cycles. And all of the rinse cycles with this machine are in cold water.

Hopefully switching to warm won’t cause too much damage, but will actually clean our clothes.

Have you experienced this? Any advice?