What takes soot out of Firefighters clothes?

[Sunflower]

There is a 20,000 + fire going on in our area and we are happily washing firefighters clothes for them.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I could add to the wash cycle to take some of the soot debree/smell out?

Also, there is a fair amount of chain saw oil. I read posts about fire and oil and won't leave piles of hot laundry anywhere. (Yikes!)

[Andy]

We add about 1/2 cup of TSP (trisodium phosphate) and roughy 1 cup vinegar to the wash water.

Smell the clothes before you dry them if you still smell smoke repeat the wash.

You can buy TSP at any Home Depot, Lowes or hardware store-it is commonly used to clean heavily soiled walls before painting.

There are several commercially available solutions designed for this purpose, I have used a couple of them and they don't seem to work any better than the above recommendation, they do however cost more.

I normally charge $0.90 per pound for regular wash & fold and $2.50 per pound for smokey clothes-as noted above you might have to wash some items multiple times to get the desired result.

[DuboisLaundry]

If I could convince myself to use phosphate in the laundry I would try TSP, but probably only for special cases.

I think I would be putting the TSP in the first bath and the Vinegar in the 2nd (on a typical 3 bath front loader) - I almost never use toploaders in my WDF

something about the Vinegar's acid neutralizing the alkali
I can be talked out of it by someone who has tried it both ways.