Your Sheets Are Clean And Other Laundry Myths.

Ten out of a hundred patients that enter a hospital for treatment will pick up a secondary infection  from the hospital  which will make them  even more sick.    This is called Nosocomial infection and is best illustrated by a young man playing football on a Saturday afternoon.     Strong,  and  Healthy  as he kicks the ball he cracks a bone in his ankle.    He goes to hospital and comes out on Thursday with his ankle in  plaster and Tuberculosis in his lungs that he got from the pillow slips and sheets that he laid in at the hospital.

 Translate the above statement to your loved one, a wife, a husband, a child lying is a hospital bed, recovering from a life threatening sickness, steadily improving, until you get that dreaded phone call. He/she has picked up an infection and has had to be transferred to the Intensive Care Unit.   

 The word Nosocomial is not used any more, it is now known as H.A.I.  or  Hospital Acquired Infection.   Of the 10% of patients  infected by the hospital it has been studied that 17% of this infection comes from  sleeping in linen that has been cold or warm water washed  at the laundry.

 What is the difference between a steam wash and a cold water or warm water wash, and why is the steam wash so important  in this day and age.

 A steam wash begins with the installation of a steam boiler  and piping it to washing machines that are designed for steam heating.

A high pressure steam pipe is installed to bring live steam directly into the wash liquor.     The washing machine is loaded correctly with soiled linen, then detergent and cold water are added and the wash starts. 

 For a while the load is allowed to run cold. This removes substances like blood, albumin, etc.

 After several minutes of the cold wash the valve on the steam pipe is opened and live steam is introduced to the load. 

Within three minutes the wash and the linen is heated to  just under a boil  85° C  to  95° C.

 This very fast change in the temperature from cold to  just under a boil in the wash liquor within three minutes is important because germs and virus just cannot survive  that  heat, that fast.

During a wash in an electrically heated washing machine Bacteria can live through the slow heating process by forming spherical spores. These spores are resistant to heat, and  detergent.   The bacteria, ( germs and virus ) live as spores until their surrounding conditions improve. Then they change back to their original form and return to their active cycle, multiplying rapidly.

 The perfect wash requires four  factors.

  1. Mechanical action.     2. Detergent.     3. Time.      4. Heat.

 Each item  is important.  Heat  needs to be  immediate  and  severe.

In a laundry that does not have steam boilers the wash starts with cold water.  In  theory the heating elements are switched on.   The cold  wash  will still take place as it takes several minutes for the electrical heaters to even make the wash liquor warm.  That is, even if they are switched on. It can then take between ten and twenty minutes to take the temperature up to a low but warm  40° C.   By this time the germs and virus are already hibernating.  Ready to come back to life and multiply as the first rinse comes through.  

 That is if the heating cycle was turned on.   Let us examine this carefully.     At the steam laundry,  steam is already in the boilers to heat up the drying tumblers, the presses and the mangles. The percentage of steam used to heat the wash liquor is about 10% of the steam load.  The steam laundry management never  has  to  confront  the  cost  of  heating the washing machines.

 But at the laundry without boilers electricity is already a very expensive item.   Electricity turns the motors driving the mangles and  drying tumblers but electricity is also used to heat up these drying and ironing machines.  We all know how much it costs to heat up a cold room or the geyser for the bath.  And how long it takes.    Drying tumblers and electrically heated  ironers need to run eight or twelve hours a day. Five days a week four weeks a  month, that’s a heavy load of electricity to pay for.

He said “ What for “ and I explained that that is what it would cost us if we used electricity instead of coal raised steam  to heat the water.

 With the new price of electricity do we really imagine that  the heating process  on an electrically heated washing machine is ever, ever, even turned on.

 How many government hospitals and private hospitals and Hotels are there in South Africa  where the soiled linen  is sent to laundries without boilers.

 One of my competitors went to see a four star hotel the other day.

My competitor and his father had serviced the hotel for many years, but they had lost the order to a laundry without boilers.

 “ Why “ they asked, and were told that the price was cheaper and the towels, sheets and pillow slips would be lasting longer  with the cold wash system.   “ What about  bacteria still being present on the clean sheets and pillow slips and towels ‘ they asked.