New Zealanders' dirty laundry habits aired

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Dealing with laundry can be dirty business - and just how we deal with the washing has been revealed in a new survey released today.

Most New Zealand women say they will often use a cold cycle to save money. A high number of Aucklanders (45 per cent) were found to be the least likely to use a cold wash cycle specifically to save money, and those in Northland were most likely (74 per cent) to choose cold water to bring down the power bill.

Others admitted they had a "floor-drobe'' - 12 per cent of people confessing to often leaving their clothes on the floor. Most of those people were Generation Y respondents.

Results for the Canstar Blue survey, out this afternoon, looked at washing machines and how we rated them. But it also focused on New Zealanders' laundry and clothing care habits.

Up to 2500 people from around the country took part in the survey.

Among the results, 15 per cent of Kiwis said they had ruined clothes because they had mixed colours and whites in the wash.

A total of 24 per cent of participants admitted ignoring care labels and tags and washing all clothing items on the same machine setting.

Nearly a quarter of people surveyed did not know that the insides of a washing machine had to be cleaned.

Auckland participants were most likely to use hot water for hygienic reasons - as were Cantabrians - while 20 per cent of people in the Bay of Plenty had ruined clothes because of mixing colours and whites.

Thirty-three per cent of people in Hawke's Bay did not know the inside parts of a washing machine had to be washed and those in Wellington were least likely to have ruined their clothes by mixing colours.

Up to 4 per cent of people from the Manawatu-Whanganui region said they had, at some point, left their clothes in the washing machine only to find them later and had to re-wash them.