SHOULD YOU BUY THIS DETERGENT-FREE LAUNDRY ALTERNATIVE?

WashZilla Laundry Cleaning Orb™ says it has science on its side, so we put it to the test.

When we first heard about Washzilla, we immediately thought of all those "laundry balls" that appeared on home shopping channels in the 1990s. The majority of these were determined not to work, and it turned out a lot of the companies that made them were actually multilevel marketing scams.

However, in recent years, the demand for eco-friendly laundry solutions has increased. So we decided to put the Washzilla to the test. Specifically, we were interested in looking into the claims that these plastic and ceramic balls could deal with tough stains anywhere near as well as traditional laundry detergents.

Washzilla - Do They Really Work?

Washzilla claims that its laundry balls increase the pH of water to help get rid of stains.

The company states that its bioceramics increase the pH of water by 0.6 after only 15 minutes of exposure. This is important because it has been well documented that most bacteria thrive between a pH of 6.5 and 7. So by increasing the pH, Washzilla hopes soils will more easily wash away and that your laundry will be disinfected.

At the end of the day, the biggest claim Washzilla makes is that the laundry ball will clean your clothes as well as traditional detergents for up to 1,000 washes.

The Test: No More Detergent — Ever!

A close up look at the Washzilla in action.

In order to really zero in on Washzilla's capabilities, we decided to test it in our state-of-the-art labs. The controlled environment accounted for humidity, air temperature, and water temperature. With the extraneous factors out of the way, we decided to pit the Washzilla against the most popular brand of store-bought detergent, as well as plain old hot water.

We used a standard store-bought detergent to challenge Washzilla.

Stain removal depends on three things: Agitation, water, and chemistry. Anyone who ever blotted out a food stain from a shirt in a restaurant bathroom knows that different stains require different methods of removal. That's why we used stain strips to quantify how each cleaning agent performed.

These strips are mechanically coated with common household substances like cocoa and red wine, and the three tests were performed with the Kenmore 25132, a top-loader very similar to what's found in a lot of U.S. homes. We set the Kenmore to its highest temperature setting and used the Normal cycle.

After each test cycle, we analyzed the stain strips with a photo spectrometer to determine how much of the stain had been lifted. Since we know what the color of the cloth is underneath all the stains, we calculated how close the cleaning agents came in restoring the test strips to their native state.

The Results

We came to a solid conclusion: When it comes to stain removal, Washzilla does not work any better than hot water. And, when it comes to some important stains, Washzilla often works far worse than laundry detergent.

The hard numbers show that the store-bought detergent did 4 percent better across the board at stain removal than Washzilla.

Washzilla performed about the same as hot water, and from these results, we can conclude that Washzilla had a negligible effect on stain removal.

On top are the results of the Washzilla. When compared to the water-only wash on the bottom, we found that they had the same amount of overall stain removal.

However, when we delve into the individual stains themselves, the story gets a bit more interesting. Washzilla, water, and detergent all did about the same when it came to removing carbon, blood, and cocoa—meaning that hot water and agitation did most of the heavy lifting.

But on sweat stains, detergent did a whopping 14 percent better at cleaning than Washzilla or water. This is, in our opinion, Washzilla's greatest failing: Since clothes are worn by people, they almost always get sweat stains. Unless you're alright with wearing dingy shirts with yellowed armpits, you should stick with detergent.