How Much Detergent to Use in Your Nexxt?

Before buying our first Nexxt several years ago I'd never owned a front-loader and had only used them a handful of times. I did know to not put much soap in, so we bought natural soap that was labeled as OK for front loaders, and cut the recommended amount for each load by more than half.

Within about 18 months we were plagued with the E:04 errors; too much soap still. Turns out these machines are so efficient that even that reduced amount of soap was too much, and a film had built up on the drain impeller. Read my first post for how we dealt with this.

Anyhow, when we bought our current home, which came with an ancient top-loading Hotpoint machine that sucked in pretty much every way (energy hog, water hog, loud, slow, and didn't do a very good job), we jumped when shopping for a chest freezer my wife found a barely-used Nexxt for a few hundred bucks off.

When the shop delivered it and the delivery guy/installer was showing me how to run it (I stupidly told him we'd had one for a couple years and I knew how to run it), he mentioned about how much detergent to use. I showed him what I used at our old place, to which he responded "way too much." According to him, the machine only requires about a tablespoon of detergent for a full load of towels; less for lighter loads. I was skeptical though gave it a whirl.

We live active lives on almost 30 acres in rural Maine. Our kids seem to make a point of getting as dirty as possible, our youngest is still in cloth diapers (mostlyy ;), and we're still doing the local co-op's laundry. In short, even using almost no soap the machine still gets everything sparkling clean, and we wash everything but diapers on cold. I love that machine!