Cold-water washing is a small source of contention in our home. My husband likes to show me any stats he reads about how much money and energy cold water washing saves, but I’m not so sure how accurate those stats are… at least not for our family.

I first tried cold-water washing last summer when our baby was about 6 or 7 months old. He was a big spitter, and was pretty messy with his baby foods. Most meals were eaten in the nude, but he often would spit up all over me shortly after a meal. And that spit up did not come out with cold-water washing. Not even when I splurged and bought the specially formulated detergent.

This meant that at least a third of most loads had to be hand-scrubbed and re-washed. Doing at least 2 washes has to eat into that energy savings.

It did go a little better if I pre-scrubbed most of our clothes. But all that scrubbing and extra washing can’t be good for your clothes, so the shortened life of your clothes would also cut into those savings.

We ended up compromising, and I washed most loads in warm water, saving the hot only for diapers. I would do cold loads when I knew the clothes weren’t in danger of being stained.

But now that our baby is a toddler and not spitting up as much, I’m willing to try again. Hopefully, our issues had more to do with our stage in life than anything else.

Do you cold-water wash? Any tips for someone who is obviously a novice?

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?