laundromat, originally uploaded by catbagan. used under a Creative Commons license.
This started off as a simple comment to this post. I was about to write something like “ha ha, that does sound like an excessive amount of laundry. ” But then I got to thinking about the subject a little more and it turns out I’ve got some thoughts about laundry (and I’ve been doing my own laundry since the 7th grade, and that was a long time ago so I have a little bit of experience with the subject matter).
Now, it’s not like I sit around all day thinking about laundry and average loads of laundry per household, but, if I had ever given it much thought I would have come up with the notion that I probably do an average amount of laundry for my household.
Average household size, by the way, as defined by the 2000 US Census is 2.59 persons.
After a very liberal estimate of laundry usage at my house (a hold of two persons), in which I fired up Excel and made a quick spreadsheet, I came to the conclusion that my household does the following amount of laundry (where “loads of laundry” = number of loads run through the washing machine):
- 156 loads of laundry/year
- 1.5 loads of laundry/week
Factors to consider…
My place of work is pretty casual and I could get away with jeans and a t-shirt everyday of my life if I wanted. This means that I never go to the dry cleaners. Ever. Actually, that’s not true, I might go to the dry cleaners once, maybe twice a year in order to make my suit look nice if I’m shooting a wedding, but otherwise, no dry cleaning for me.
No dry cleaning means I wash everything at home. Luckily, things here are pretty easy… Every two weeks or so I have about two loads of darks to wash… Two cycles of cold water and I’m done. None of this warm wash/cold rinse stuff for me. So I’m saving energy there by not having to heat water with the electric water heater. Then, I hang dry all of my shirts, so that’s at least one cycle of the dyrer that is spared.
Now, the energy savings stop when it comes time to wash large, bulky items (like towels and sheets). My washer is at least 20 years old and is a top loading model of probably medium capacity. The agitator is a little wonky at times, so you have to be strategic when it comes to washing larger loads (like towels and sheets). Instead of dumping everything into one load you have to split stuff up into at least two loads (sometimes three) or else this terrible KA-CHUNK sound occurs during the rinse cycle and a buzzer goes off that you can hear all the way upstairs. The sound is really auwful and when it goes off a slight amount of panic ensues and you end up running down to the basement in order to push in the dial and make it stop. And so every couple of weeks, in order to avoid that horrible “the washer is ajar” alarm, I split larger loads into smaller loads and thus screw up my average number of washes. And I assume waste energy.
If I had my dream washer, a giant front loading model, I could save on water and energy and reduce the number of loads (also I could wash my sleeping bags at home and not have to take them to the coin laundry in Annandale next to the 7-11 where all the day labourers hang out - not that there’s anything wrong with day labourers… it’s really the coin laundry bit I don’t like). Unfortuneately a large front loading washer is not in this year’s budget and so I will have to made do with what I’ve got (unless someone can point out the savings that might be obtained by reducing the number of laundry loads performed at my house).
Thanks to John Catbagan for letting me use his photo. Check out his work on Flickr.
