One of the appeals of my new place was the washing machine. I had been doing all of laundry by hand, and it really sucked. Last night I did my first load and I realized that just having a machine didn’t mean that the labor was over.
True, this one does indeed “wash” the clothes, but even just hooking it up was a pain. There is a really short cord on the back, and there’s no outlet in the bathroom. It needed to stay in the bathroom because there is no water hookup. Not only does this mean that I had to fill it up my self (more on that later), but when the wash water is drained, it just dumps it on the floor. That isn’t a problem since my bathroom, like most of them here, is one big shower stall. I don’t have a drain in the center, it’s off to the side, but the idea is the same. It’s actually kind of nice, I end up washing the floor every time I take a shower. I just squeegee after the shower and voila! Clean floor…
Anyway, I figured that I could just use an extension cable to hook the washing machine up to the outlet that is right outside the door for the hot water heater. Right, so first I rigged up some strings to support the extension cord, and ran the plug to the outlet. Surprise! It uses a plug arrangement that not only have I never seen here before, it is totally incompatible with all of my adaptors. It actually looks a lot like the 220 plugs back home, but all of the plugs here are 220, I have no idea why they would use a different one… Anyway, I stretched an extension from the kitchen and connected the extension cable from the bathroom to it. All that was left was to plug the washing machine in, ARGHHH! It uses another plug I haven’t seen, all of the prongs are slanted. Luckily, one of my many adaptors did the trick. I have now seen 5 different plugs/receptacles here; make sure you bring plenty of plug adaptors with you if you come over here for any amount of time…
So I now had power, I put the clothes in and the soap and started to fill it with water. Let me tell you, it takes a considerable number of bucketfuls to fill that tank… At long last I could start the machine, there was only one problem, all of the controls were in Chinese… I figured it out eventually. After the washing is complete, you switch the middle dial to the right and all of the wash water drains out. Then I had to fill it up again so that it could be rinsed. That went on for a while, then I drained it again. Then you take the clothes out of the wash bin and put them into the spinner to get rid of most of the water. The trick is that the spinner has about a third of the volume of the wash tub, so it took several iterations to get it all done. The clothes were fairly dry when they came out, but they have to be hung up for the final drying.
The total amount of labor is still about the same as hand washing, but it is far easier on my back. The clothes do get cleaner too, hand washing would get rid of the major clumps, but my goal with the hand washing was to not smell… There’s still a lot of time involved, especially with the spin cycle. At least with the washing and rinsing I can go do something else, but I have to keep my weight on the machine during the spin to keep it from vibrating and jumping everywhere… It really makes you appreciate the all in one washing machines, you know the ones where you put in the clothes and soap and walk away. Oh well, I guess it is progress….
One reply on “Washing my clothes”
I would end up washing with soap twice and then rinsing twice, so that by the time the water had drained the last time, it was mostly clear-ish. unfortunately i never figured out if that was because the clothes were cleaner or because the soap was actually removing the color…
funny… i actually kind of miss that way. i really think my clothes got cleaner. though that’s probably a psychological thing of watching the brown/grey water come out the first time, no doubt.