Review: Boost Your Wash

My kids are not the cleanest. Despite reminding them to eat carefully, they frequently come home from school wearing some of their lunch - usually pasta sauce. Missy Woo has a serious drawing and colouring in habit and although her propensity to draw on herself has receded in recent months, she often gets felt pen on her clothes. And Monkey, well, he's a boy and does boy things - play football, ride his bike, run around, get mucky. I'm constantly dealing with stains. And I want the uniform I've just paid hard cash for to last more than a few weeks. I'm forever using stain removers. The one I use is hit and miss - I won't name it but it rhymes with banish - and it's a nuisance having to go through everything to spray it on.

I was asked if I'd like to review something called Boost Your Wash, which is designed to do just that - work with your soap powder to make it more effective at cleaning and removing stains and smells. I got sent a bottle, along with a very pretty polka dot peg bag. Said peg bag was very useful as my pegs have been residing in a small Ikea blue bag (and I mean small, so small they don't sell them in the shops - don't ask) after the carrier bag they used to reside in started to decompose without being buried.

Boost Your Wash comes in a bottle so I thought that meant the product was a liquid - but it's not. It's a powder. You use 1 - 2 caps in your washing machine when you need boosting, depending on how filthy your little darlings have got their clothes. A 500ml bottle should be enough for about 16 washes. Now, I use all detergents sparingly - given that half a washing tablet produces quite a lot of foam in my machine so I erred towards the 1 cap option so it may last longer. It can also be used in hand washes but you do need to remember to wash your hands well afterwards - which sounds scary, but I do still have hands so maybe it wasn't so bad after all.

The results have been pretty good so far. In a hand wash, I found it helped to remove marks without as much rubbing as usual. When used on the weekend uniform wash, all marks and stains appear to have gone. It also appears to have worked on some older stains that have been in previous washes. My whites haven't turned grey either, which is always a bonus. And it's easy to use - just add it to your powder drawer, rather than rooting through the dirty pile of laundry to find anything offensive.

Boost Your Wash costs £3.99 for a 500ml bottle, meaning it costs around 25p per use. That might seem a lot - I reckon my detergent costs me about 10p a go although I buy them cheaply - but compared to the cost of having to buy new clothes because the old ones are ruined, that's cheap. I don't think I'd use it for every wash, but for regular washes of school uniform, which costs a bomb to replace, it's perfect. On that basis, I'd definitely recommend you give it a try if you feel like you're losing the battle with your laundry mountain.

Boost Your Wash is available from Waitrose, Tesco, Robert Dyas and Ocado.

(I was provided with a full size bottle of Boost Your Wash to review and a peg bag. I have received no other compensation. The opinions stated here are my own, and have not been influenced by the aforementioned compensation.)