By: Emily Wilbourn

 The purpose for this experiment is to find out which laundry detergent is most effective against chocolate syrup.  I was interested in finding out which laundry detergent is most effective against chocolate syrup because I sometimes get stains in my shirts (usually chocolate) and I wanted to find out which detergent that I should use to get it out.

When I did some researching, I found out that getting chocolate syrup out of clothing is very difficult. That’s why I chose to use chocolate syrup.

My hypothesis is that Tide is going to get the stain out the best. I believe this because my mom has used it before and it worked really well and got the stain out.

 The types of laundry detergent used were Gain, Purex, All, Tide, and a homemade laundry detergent.  The type of chocolate syrup used was Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup.

1. I put ½ of a teaspoon of chocolate syrup on a strip of white fabric. 2. I let it sit out for 30 minutes. 3. I put the strip of fabric, the kind of laundry detergent I was going to use, and other clothes my mom and I were going to wash in the washing machine. My mom and I put ½ cup of laundry detergent in the load of laundry.

 Before  After If you look really closely, then you can see part of a stain on the right side of the fabric in the After picture as indicated in the red oval.

 Before  After You can easily see the stain on the After picture in the orange circle.

 Before  After You can’t see the stain on the After picture very well, but if you look in the black oval you can see the barely visible stain, if you look hard enough.

 Before  After If you look really closely in the purple circle, then you can see part of the stain in the After picture.

 Before  After You can see the stain on the After picture, if you look closely in the yellow rectangle and the black circle. The reason there is two stains is that I spread out the chocolate syrup a lot and apparently two spots on it got rubbed in more than other parts of the fabric.

My hypothesis was incorrect. All got the chocolate syrup stain out the best. Tide also worked really well, but I could make out the stains ( look at the orange circle at the right side of the previous slide) on Tide a lot easier than I could on All. Some factors that might have played in it was:  The amount of clothing I put in the washing machine along with the strips of fabric is one factor. If I put a lot of clothes in the load, then more of the chocolate syrup might have gotten rubbed off more than the other strips of fabric.  The ingredients in the detergents is another factor. If the ingredients are different in Tide and All, then there will be different results. That might explain part of why there are different results. That may have been a big factor in the experiment because I noticed that the chocolate syrup I put on it was the most rubbed in of all of the strips of fabric. I didn’t even mean to make it the most rubbed in!

All and Tide have different ingredients, so that may have been another factor to the experiment. I only compared and contrasted Tide and All because Tide was the detergent that I thought was going to do the best and All was the detergent that actually did the best.  Ingredients for All are: Biogradable surfactants(anionic and nonionic) buffering agent, stabilizer, brightening agents  Ingredients in Tide are: Biogradable surfactants(anionic and nonionic) and enzymes