The Laundry Cycle

“I don’t remember Annie getting new carpet,” I think to myself as I step into my 10-year-old daughter’s room. All the shades are pulled and the lights are off (for once), so it’s dark as I pad across her surprisingly padded floor. When I reach her desk and flip on the desk light, right away I see the culprit: Annie doesn’t have new carpet–she’s got a collection of all of our bath towels spread across her floor. No wonder I’ve had to dig out the pool towels to dry off after my own showers: Annie’s been keeping a colony of towels in her room.

I crouch down to perform my own unscientific sniff test, which should determine how long these towels have been in here, and if they need an immediate washing. I notice that most are still damp to the touch. My nose confirms my suspicions: not only does Annie have a towel colony in here, she’s got a burgeoning mildew colony, too.

I gather the towels one by one and hang them over my bent arm. I count eight towels, all of them musty and dank. I hold my breath as I make my way down the hall to the laundry room. Once there, I drop the towels on the floor, and exhale like Ariel from “The Little Mermaid,” after she’d traded her voice for legs, couldn’t breathe underwater, and needed to rush to and breakthrough the water’s surface so she could breathe again.

To get all of these towels clean and smelling normal again, it’s going to take a couple of really long laundry loads, plus some bleach (or vinegar, which I’ve read gets rid of mildew odors in laundry).

It’s pretty painless to do multiple loads of laundry in our new house. Our laundry room is upstairs, next door to the master bedroom. There’s plenty of space to store dirty clothes and hang up the clean ones to dry. And the washing machine that came with the house has a decent capacity, even though it’s a top loader. What I don’t like, if industry averages are right, is that it uses about 40 gallons of water per load.

Right now that’s not an issue for us, because we are using well water. However, we are hooking up to our town’s public water within the next few months, meaning that very soon, we are going to have to start paying for water. With 40 gallons of water down the drain for each load of laundry, and me doing two to three loads of laundry a day, our water bill is going to quickly add up. Actually, a Grist Magazine article says that the average American household uses 16,000 gallons of water each year, and that’s just to wash clothes. Sorry for the pun but that’s quite a lot of drops in the bucket.

Besides the added cost of paying for water, we really have to think about the energy our top-loader uses. Energy Star estimates that by switching from a washing machines built before 1994 to a more energy-efficient model, we could save about a $110 a year in electricity costs. Well, the good news is that the previous owner bought this General Electric washing machine in 2000 (I just found the original paperwork.) The bad news? The washing machine totally doesn’t qualify as an Energy Star appliance. In fact, it looks to be a real power sucker with a zero rating.

So the decision we need to make is this: does it make more financial sense for us to get rid of our perfectly good–yet inefficient–washing machine, and spend money on a new washing machine that will use less water (new front loaders use 18 to 25 gallons of water per load) and cost less in electricity to run? Or do we just keep the darn thing until something catastrophic happens? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what our water bills look like once we make the switch to public water.

In the meantime I’ll continue to watch the Sunday circulars for sales (though an article in the October 2007 issue of Working Mother magazine said that April/May, not September, are when retailers are most likely to discount appliances), and practice what I hope is my small way of saving money and energy use when I do laundry. What I do includes:

* Always washing using cold water.

* Letting laundry soak inside the washing machine for an hour or two, then resume washing using the “light” cycle. I believe that you use less water and energy overall, and my clothes seem to come out cleaner.

* Never skipping the spin cycle. The washing machine acts like a centrifuge by spinning and sucking the excess water out of clothes. They’ll dry quicker in the dryer, and then I don’t have to run the dryer as long.

* Whenever possible, hanging up clothes to dry. I don’t have a clothes line so I hang stuff up in the laundry room. Here’s my system: place well-spun, wet laundry in the dryer on high for five minutes. Then, one by one, pull out articles of clothing, shake out the wrinkles, and hang up on plastic or wood hangers. (Metal might rust and stain your clothes.) If you don’t have the space in your laundry room, you can hang the clothes in a bathroom, basement or wherever you have room.