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Learning About Laundry

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction#

I love doing laundry. I love the magic of taking a basket of dirty clothes and guiding them through whatever they need to produce a stack of fresh, clean, soft clothes ready to be worn. And since laundry is something that I will do for my entire life, I think it’s worth investing time to learn how to do laundry well! The writings in this section are some of my learnings about laundry. Hopefully they can help you too.

LG Front Loader Water Levels

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

(Last updated: April 3, 2026.) This post is available for discussion on Reddit.

The Short Version of the Story#

“How can I get my LG Front Loader to use more water?!” The fact that this is such a common recurring question points to a real need for more information about the inner workings of LG front loaders and how to extract the best cleaning performance from them. I know I struggled with this question for a long time, and I went down a couple counter-productive roads before I finally figured out how to get wash results I’m happy with. This post is a recounting of my journey.

LG Front Loader US Temperatures

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

(Last updated: April 3, 2026.) This post is available for discussion on Reddit.

How Do I Get an Actual Hot Wash Out of my LG Front Loader (LGFL)?

I recently decided to map out exactly what wash temperatures I was seeing in my LGFL washers. After an initial look it became clear that these LGFL machines behave very differently with temperature than what I had previously assumed and than what is written in most official documents I’ve found. It’s also telling that the official US manuals for the machines don’t list ANY temperatures and only say that the internal heater is used for the “extra hot” setting. As best I can tell, these behaviors seem specific to the US versions of the machines and the culprit is the US Department of Energy (DOE) energy consumption standards which require the machine makers to implement automatic temperature control and which specify hot as 100F (38C) - 108F (42C). Apparently the days of “hot means 140F (60C)” are long gone in the US. It’s also no longer true that hot means “the hot water temp at your tap” anymore. So what temperatures are you actually getting?