Do Laundry Detergent Sheets Work as Well as Liquid?

CR has long tested and rated liquid detergents, pods, and packs. So our test engineers recently put laundry sheets from six brands—Earth Breeze, Ecos, Ecowise, Kind, Sheets Laundry Club, and Tru Earth—to the test.

To test detergents, our engineers launder fabric swatches that are saturated with blood, body oil, chocolate, coffee, dirt, grass, and salad dressing. We use stains that are exceedingly hard to remove so that we can detect real differences among products. We wash using the normal cycle, cold water, high spin, and heavy soil setting.

Even the best detergents can’t remove every stain completely. But laundry sheets as a group didn’t perform well—netting scores that range from mediocre to lousy.

“In fact, they had lower performance as a group than our lowest-performing liquid or pod/packs detergents,” Handel says. And only one brand of laundry sheet performs better than mediocre while cleaning any stain (Earth Breeze Liquidless Eco Sheets performs moderately when it comes to cleaning dirt).

By comparison, the top-scoring liquid detergent in our ratings—Tide Plus Ultra Stain Release—earns an Overall Score of 84, with impressive marks for cleaning a variety of stains, including body oil, dirt, and salad dressing. The top pod/pack in our tests, Tide Plus Hygienic Clean Heavy Duty 10X Power, receives a 78. By contrast, Earth Breeze, the top-rated laundry strip brand, earned a 29. Tru Earth Eco Strips, the lowest-rated laundry sheets, received an abysmal Overall Score of 11.

We also found that the laundry sheets we tested are especially ineffective at cleaning coffee stains. If you start your day with a cup of joe, you may want to skip these strips in favor of a liquid such as Tide Eco-Box Original, the highest-rated detergent for these tough stains.