4 Reasons to Add Vinegar to Your Next Load of Laundry

Vinegar is a substance that almost everyone has tucked away under their sink at home. That's because there are so many different uses for the ingredient, which can be used in everything from DIY cleaning mixes to some of your favorite condiments.

But vinegar also has a place in a surprising part of your home: your laundry room. That's right — white vinegar can help get your clothes cleaner, your whites whiter, and even banish unpleasant odors from your washing machine.

Keep reading to learn more about why you should probably start using vinegar in your laundry, including some surprising hacks for troubleshooting common laundry issues.

There are plenty of reasons to keep a jug of white vinegar next to your washing machine. The chemical, which the Brightland blog describes as an acid that falls somewhere between a 2 and a 3 on the pH scale, can be used to help target specific problems in the wash.

It's often a favorite tactic for those looking to soften household linens like towels, according to The Spruce, and it can even be used to dissolve long-standing stains and odors like what you'd expect to find in the armpit area of a shirt.

But vinegar can do even more than that; it can also help keep your washing machine running smoothly by cleaning and disinfecting the appliance!

That's because some of the same benefits vinegar has when cleaning clothes can also be realized when used during routine maintenance of your washer. In fact, many people swear by vinegar when it comes to keeping mold and mildew from building up in the problem areas of their front load washing machine.

You can bust buildup using vinegar by adding a half cup of the product to the fabric softener portion of your detergent dispenser. If you don't have a built-in dispenser, you can always add the vinegar manually at the start of your rinse cycle, but only if you have a washing machine that allows you to open the lid mid-cycle.

A little vinegar can also go a long way for those hoping to keep their whites white and their darks dark. When trying to whiten, you can boil a cup of white vinegar in a 1-gallon pot of water. Remove the pot from the heat source and then add in the whites you're looking to refresh, allowing them to soak overnight.

When it comes to keeping darks looking their best, a half cup of vinegar in the rinse cycle will do the trick.

As I mentioned, vinegar can also help eliminate odors. For those trying to stamp out the smell of mildew, all you'll need to do is add 2 cups of vinegar to the drum of your washing machine before running it on a hot cycle.

If you're looking to knock out some pungent odors like cigarette smoke or sweat, you'll need a more targeted approach. For example, you can spray undiluted vinegar onto the armpit area of a shirt, allowing it to soak for 10 minutes before washing like normal.

For more widespread smells (think: cigarette smoke), you can soak your clothes overnight in a large tub with 1 to 2 cups of vinegar before washing like you normally would.

As you can see, vinegar has all sorts of benefits in the laundry room. So, add a jug of distilled white vinegar to your shopping list ahead of your next laundry day and try some of these hacks out — your clothes will likely thank you for it!