...from my personal experience the Hotpoint 95 series were good enough at rinsing; some people here have remarked that they weren't the best, however. Obviously you'd get more of a volume of water passing through the load compared to your Bosch so in that respect they might be better...but the tumbling is vigorous, and this is followed by fast distribution and a couple of short spins where the extracted susdy water barely has time to be pumped away before fill begins again. All that action makes for a potentially less effective rinse than other more carefully programmed machines.

I can't comment with any real authority of how well rinsed clothes actually were in times gone by. I do remember other people having very scratchy towels, for example. I've used a Hoover Electron once and that didn't astound me with its rinsing abilities even after guzzling a ridiculous amount of water only to do very little indeed with it! If only we could do a real test with old machines and equally old detergents to see if things really were that much better! The machines are still out there; how on earth one procures a usable box of 1980s Persil Automatic, however, is anyone's guess.

Anyway, good luck with the non-mainstream detergents. I'm surprised you've found Method and Simply difficult to buy - they're pretty well represented these days (well, down at my Sainsbury's anyway...depends where you shop I suppose).