Saturday, October 27, 2012
One Month of Less: Day 27: Do Laundry Without Detergent?
We need to buy a washer and dryer for our new house (closing date delayed ... but ASAP) and went out looking today. I have an unexplainable obsession with washing machines. Apparently on a 2005 family vacation to Georgia, I found it important to take a picture with the washing machine in our vacation house.
This was briefly eclipsed by a fascination with vacuum cleaners in college. This stage was also immortalized by photo documentation, which I have no plans of sharing. I guess I am an appliance kind of person?
I wasn't looking forward to shopping for a washer and dryer, because there are just too many options and it's so much money. We ended up going to a privately owned appliance store that looked like a funeral home from the ouside. The man who helped us happens to be my husband's cousin's boyfriend's father. Also, my husband's ex-girfriend's ex-boyfriend's wife's father. More importantly, he's a living appliance encyclopedia. Or as my mother would say, the "Google truth or lie" of appliances. I told him I wanted a washer and dryer that could be stacked, and I work in a hospital so I wanted some sort of sanitize option.
That narrows things down hardly at all. Bascially, every washing machine washes, and every front loader can stack. Instead of taking us through each machine and the features/advantages/price, he took us straight to a Whirpool one that he recommended. This set was on sale because they were coming out with a new model. There also were things about the drum and energy savings and water use and such ... we had a winner!
Jon literally had to take my hands off of the control knob and tell me to stop playing with it.
What REALLY got me excited was the next thing he showed us. It's called the PureWash Laundry system, and it uses ionized water to clean your laundry. You don't have to use laundry detergent or fabric softener, there are no cartridges or parts to replace, and you can wash all your clothes in cold water.
What??
Oh and did I mention all your clothes are supposed to smell like rain when they come out?
I looked it up on youtube to confirm:
They were selling the unit for about $375. That would pay itself off a lot quicker if I didn't make my own laundry detergent ... but apparently most of your cost savings would be from washing everything in cold water.
We haven't decided one way or the other -- I haven't heard of anyone else using these. Is it worth the money?
For the month of October I'm doing one thing a day that is a step towards a simpler way of living -- less cluttered, less wasteful, less distracted. My goal through this month of less is that by taking a new step every day, I will be able to live in a way that is more organized, more stewardly, more purposeful. Read more about it here, and let me know if you're joining in!
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Haha! Sounds just like the laundry ball Nate keeps trying to get me to get rid of because he doesn't believe in it. It was "expensive" (about $35, plus some shipping costs for that and something else), I bought it at a Tupperware-like party at my neighbor's house. It is supposed to last for 200 washes or 2 years or something like that, and you recharge it in the sun every month. For the first three months things did indeed smell like rain/ozone. Then, just clean. Now I'm not sure it's working great anymore, and I add some detergent in with the ball. It is an H20 at Home brand laundry ball.
ReplyDeleteI think I wore it out faster that normal washing diapers with it because that's a prewash, regular wash, and an extra rinse, and I left the ball in for all of those.
I've had it for about 8 months.
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