Smelly Washing Machine vs Water Thermostat

It's now been about two weeks since I've started this process. As of last weekend, my washing machine was still smelling and on the Stench-O-Meter scale, it was still around a 3. I was still able to smell some kind of odor when I put my head into the washer.

BUT NOW, the odor isn't as as bad. My wife has been washing some loads now for the past week. No comments, no gripes, no towel under the door to keep the odors out, NOTHING. I put my head in to smell what it was like and it was hard to smell anything. It was maybe a 1.5 at most but there was a faint smell but I really had to work at it. Rotate the drum, close the washer door, put my nose to the drum. Very little.

So I'm not sure what to conclude about this. It's entirely possible that between this weekend and last is that the treatments from the Affresh, chlorine, and OxiClean did the trick and the remaining crap was just washed off over the week's wash.

The only thing that did change was the thermostat. I could say that it might be the powdered detergent but we switched about 2 weeks ago. The thermostat, however, was set to 115 degrees. I've since changed it to 120. I figured that it might be entirely possible that the water isn't hot enough by the time it fills the washer. We have a Rinnai tankless water heater. We can adjust the heat between 110 to 140 degrees. The water takes a minute or two get hot and by the time it gets to the washer about half the wash is in relatively cold water. So I figured that increasing the temp up would help. This might make sense for how I got into this smelly mess. I did decrease the temp down to 115 to save on the water heating costs roughly a year ago. But after a whole winter, it's really the gas air heater and not the water heater contributing to my gas bills. So the timeline makes sense given that it might take a year to build up all this crap. I owned the washer for 2 years prior and didn't have an odor problem. So on that note, I've left the temp at 120 during the week and I think that is what is helping.

That said, I did get my SmellyWasher cleaning solution on Saturday. I'm not sure if I actually need this now. I might just run it this week and see if I can get that last bit out. However, I might just save it for later. Anyways, there's supposed to be 24 cleaning portions in it so no harm in running it now.