Save Money And The Planet With DIY Laundry

I’m always looking for ways to reduce my utility bills, even if it requires a little effort on my part. I’ve been blessed with a well insulated home, and without much planning I was fortunate to purchase a home that doesn’t have many east or west-facing windows. I live in Texas, and the summer heat can be a killer from an air-conditioning perspective. Although I didn’t intentionally look for a home with this trait, I sure will next time (if I ever move)!

I came across a site based on a post from Get Rich Slowly regarding an online electricity usage calculator. This post lead me to a site that sells two fascinating products that I may purchase.

The first is a manual washing machine called “Wonder Wash“. It’s essentially a hand-cranked washing machine that costs only $42.95. It takes 2-3 minutes to wash a (obviously small) load of laundry, and it requires less water and detergent than a traditional washing machine according to the seller. The unit is compact and therefore does not require much counter space. Sounds like an ideal purchase for Jacob over at Early Retirement Extreme if he does downsize to an RV.

The other product I’m considering, which compliments the Wonder Wash, is a mini spin dryer. This device is tiny as well, and essentially extracts most, but not all, of the water out of washed clothes by spinning the clothes very rapidly. The idea here is that if you can get most of the water out of your clothes, you can then air-dry them the rest of the way or use a conventional dryer to do the rest of the work. The mini spin dryer only takes a few minutes to run, and (according to the site) reduces your traditional dryer time by quite a bit.

I don’t know for sure, but I think this type of dryer is the same kind used in natatoriums (swimming pools) to dry swim suits. Most lap pools have a device call suit mate (spelling?) that will extract about 95% of the water from your suit in about ten seconds. The one’s I’ve used sound like a jet engine, but according to laundry-alternative.com the spin dryers they offer are pretty quiet.

Laundry-alternative.com sells two spin dryers, priced at $69.95 and $134.95. With the Wonder Wash thrown in that puts the total price tag at $100-$200.

The benefit to me is that I wouldn’t have to run small loads of laundry. I workout several days a week, and I run a lot of small loads to wash my sweaty workout clothes. I wouldn’t expect my wife to use this for our towels and regular heavy-duty laundry sessions, especially once we have kids. It still might be nice to have, especially when we need to run a quick load of laundry because the pants I wanted to wear are dirty, etc. It looks like you could finish a full wash and dry cycle in about 15 minutes, assuming 3 minutes to wash, three minutes to spin dry, and 9 minutes in a traditional dryer. Not bad.

I’m not sure this purchase would payback for me at the moment, but once I have kids it would probably break even for me in a year or two. If I get desperate for another topic to write about maybe I’ll do a quick math.

Image from http://www.laundry-alternative.com, used with permission.

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