"Laundry costs money," some people say. "If you're not in a position to buy washing and drying machines, you'll be spending a lot of money in laundromats. Mostly in coins. Paying more than double what people who own washing and drying machines pay for soap and bleach, too."
What's wrong with this picture?
A hundred years ago, nobody had electric washing and drying machines. Nobody thought they needed them. Getting clothes clean took more time and energy without the machines. It was even a specialized profession, in cities where enough people who could afford to pay someone to do it lived close enough together. But no machines that plugged into the wall were necessary.
What do washing machines do? They slosh clothes around in soapy water, then in fresh water, and finally spin them around fast to use centrifugal force to extract some of that water. The sloshing part can also be done with a sturdy piece of wood in a large container of water. The spinning part used to be done by squeezing the wet cloth between a pair of rollers. Finding the rollers will be the hard part, but there are other ways to squeeze water out of cloth once it's been cleaned.
What do drying machines do? They blow dry air through wet fabric until the water evaporates out. This, too, can be done without a machine that plugs into the wall.
I'm not saying that machines don't make laundry much easier. I am saying that, if you want or need to save money, clothes can still be cleaned in the way they were before the machines were invented. Cooperative weather and muscle strength are the absolute requirements.
There are alternative ways to get the benefit of modern laundry technology, too. The only one to rule completely off the list is that lame old "just keep buying more clothes, with the pocket money the'rents send me at college, until a long weekend rolls around, then cram six weeks' worth of dirty laundry into the back of the car and wash it at the'rents' house." That's not frugal, it's infantile.
You can, of course, work out barter arrangements with people who own washing and drying machines and agree that something you do is worth the use of those machines. Cooking, driving, baby-sitting, yard work, painting, and so on are good laundry barters. Parents have been known to participate in laundry barters, but this will still look as if you needed their help to do your laundry.
As a student, you might be able to get into a dormitory or boardinghouse where use of the house laundry machines is free of charge, In an au pair or international home stay arrangement, use of the house laundry machines may be part of the deal.
There are neighborhoods where neighbors agree to share laundry machines. You might still have to pay per use, but the neighbor will probably accept currency instead of all those coins.
Or you can get a nice big waterproof tub. A washtub must be big enough for whatever you want to wash in it to slosh freely about. If you have a five-gallon bucket, you can wash a few shirts at a time. If you have a ten-gallon tub, you can wash about enough clothes to fill a pillowcase. You could use the bathtub and wash your bed linens, blankets and all. If you use the bathtub, put a strainer over the drain to avoid clogging the drain.
"In olden days, my ancestors used to wash their clothes in the river." Don't. Modern laundry detergents are much more effective, and also more toxic to aquatic animals, than lye soap used to be. Pour soapy water out on the ground to let it filter through the soil before it flows into the river.
Whatever you use for a washtub, it should be about twice as deep as the amount of soapy water you put in. You want to be able to stir the clothes about vigorously without splashing water outside the tub. Work outdoors if possible. Plan on ten or fifteen minutes of brisk sloshing to remove ordinary dirt, plus extra time for scrubbing marks like ink that won't just float away when clothes are swished through water. Slosh and scrub until everything looks, feels, and smells completely clean. As with machine washing, some things may need more than one fifteen-minute washing to come clean..
Now slosh the washed laundry in two changes of fresh water. Run fresh water over it until no more soap bubbles form in the water that's run through it. Residues of detergent in fabric can cause skin rashes.
Now press the water out of the well rinsed fabric. If you have a roller wringer, you can use it. If not, gather up the wet fabric in your hands and squeeze it against something to press out the water.
You can still buy hand-powered washing machines with roller wringers, which make this job much easier. I've mentioned my legacy washing machine, Sweet Baby James. People still find a James Wringer Washer in an antique store or on a shopping site now and then; they were built to last, but they no longer cost one or two hundred dollars. Lehmann makes something similar that sells for about $1300 online.
That can now be considered the deluxe model for families--it washes about a pillowcase full at a time. For students there are smaller, cheaper, probably more labor-intensive models, many sold without the roller wringers, that are basically buckets with lids that fit tightly around the paddle. This is a great improvement over a plain uncovered bucket when you want to wash the mud and dust out of things you wear on a construction site. Not that all of these gadgets are big enough to wash a Carhartt, or even a pair of jeans. Many are designed for instant cleaning of underwear or cloth diapers, only, on the theory that work clothes only smell like dust and paint (yeah right, and then there's the septic-smelling rich black muck you dug into, and the blood from the paper cut on your thumb...) so people wait to take them to the laundromat. And, to wring the water out of the fabric? Just drain off what runs out, then crank faster. It's the same principle as the spin cycle in an electric washing machine, but it's a lot easier for a motor than it is for the person who's been cranking the soapy water into and out of the clothes.
Here's a typical model that will wash 4 to 8 pieces of summer clothes or 1 to 5 pieces of winter clothes per load.
If your legs are stronger than your arms, or you want them to be, you could buy a foot-powered machine instead. Again, to get the water out of the washed and rinsed clothes, you pedal faster, and you can wash up to one pair of jeans or four or five shirts in one load.
There seems to be an assumption in the industry that everyone will be willing (and can afford) to take linens to the laundromat. Sweet Baby James will wash sheets, but not quilts. With the hand- or foot-powered machines in the under-$200 ranae or even in the under-$500 range, you're going to be washing quilts and blankets in the bathtub.
The Internet's marketing these devices as "off-grid" rather than "frugal" is probably the key to the vast room for improvement in the field. The ultility companies really don't want people "going off the grid." They want it not to be possible for someone who's been left alone with three school-aged children and a huge medical debt to keep those children's school clothes clean without plugging something into the wall. It's possible, but currently nobody seems interested in making it any easier.
Hand-powered or foot-powered washing machines will probably always be small, because big loads are heavy and hard to slosh efficiently. And there's a time-saving tip for really badly soiled things: before body secretions have had time to dry into fabrics, shove the soiled part down into a water-flush toilet bowl and flush; repeat as necessary, then spritz with enzyme-based "Pet Odor Remover," and then, when all visible contamination is gone, hand-wash. How much work the enzymes will do for you will amaze you. Still, there ought to be an easier way to clean a two-person coverlet,
If you live in a dry climate and get hours of bright sunshine, and if your fabrics are all pale sunbleached colors or you would prefer that they be, you can pin things out to dry on a rope stretched across the yard in the sun. Sunshine kills some pathogenic microorganisms. It also breaks down dyes in fabric, so avoid sun-drying things you wear to funerals.
If sun-drying is not feasible where you are, your motivation to pursue a good laundry barter deal will be intense. You may have to dry things indoors by hanging them up close to an electric fan, which can easily take long enough to waste as much energy as you saved by not using a drying machine. In the olden days people used to speed up the process a bit by drying things with a hot iron, cuasing the water in the fabric to steam up in a little cloud, continuing to press until the fabric was bone-dry. Soot and scorch marks often caused the whole process to have to be repeated and sometimes spoiled the look of a white collar forever. Victorians loved to pile on layers of fabrics in weights ranging from gauze to poplin, because at least a shirt whose collar had been scorched could still be worn as a collarless undershirt.
The secret to successful cash-free laundry is to resist the temptation to cut yourself slack on the sloshing and scrubbing part of things. Every particle of dirt must be removed. A little speck that nobody would see can easily attract a fungus infestation. Moldy clothes and linens look nasty, smell nasty, and may raise a rash on your skin. Everything must be thoroughly cleaned.
(If you are hand-washing your clothes and you start to find your friends keeping a healthier distance, the car pool that advertised empty seats five minutes ago filling up when you call to reserve a seat, etc., a relatively cheap way to identify the problem is to take all your clothes to the laundromat and wash them with strongly scented detergent. It can be easy to build up enough tolerance to the bacteria in your own laundry hamper that you think things smell cleaner than they do.)
If you live near a store that resells clothes in aid of a charity for which you have any respect at all, there will be tremendous temptation to buy more clothes and wait for a good laundry barter deal instead of laundering your clothes the oldfashioned way. Still, it's good to know that the oldfashioned way is an option you can fall back on.
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