Doing Laundry without Electricity

So I decided to do an experiment.
I wanted to try doing the laundry for a week without the use of electricity. Why you ask? Well for starters I like to be prepared, for whatever, then I wanted to see if I could do it, for a whole week, without breaking down.

Many of us have had that time in our lives when things are tougher than most of us thought we could handle, when money is just too tight to spend on "frivilous" things like the laundry mat. There have been times when I have washed the clothes in the bathtub, wrung them out by hand and hung them to drip dry in the livingroom. But after the last time, when helper boy was small, I decided I needed to buy a few things, as insurance if you will, so that if we got to that point again I would have an easier time of it.

First I bought a laundry plunger, the hard blue plastic kind, and a five gallon bucket. Next I bought a washboard and this year I was able to save enough to buy a small hand wringer that screws onto the side of a laundry tub or washtub.  These tools make laundry by hand sooo much easier.

First I filled the bucket with hot soapy water about 3/4 full, then add a few articles of clothing, not too many or it won't agitate enough, and then use the laundry plunger to agitate the clothes for about 10 minutes.

I washed a few pieces of clothing at a time then wrung them out by hand and then used the same water to wash a few more until I finshed that colour group of clothing.
Next I rinsed out the bucket and filled it with clean water and a little fabric softener then repeated the agitation process again. I then did a final rinse with clean clear water.

After the final rinse the clothes were put through the hand wringer and then hung on a clothes drying rack.

The bucket is grey (the water is not that dirty eww)

This amount of laundry (about a load and a half) took me around an hour. Hanging in our basement the clothes took almost 36 hours to dry.  I washed laundry this way every other day for a week.  It was more time consuming then anything else, you can't just turn it on and walk away. But I did learn that doing laundry this way is totally do-able. However I did not atempt to wash heavier items such as blankets or heavy adult hoodies. I don't think I would want to tackle those unless I had really had to.

 

Hello all!
I have decided the best way to keep track of our adventure into happiness (or maybe madness) is to keep a blog of all of our triumphs and fails, and the lessons we learn along the way.

We are a family of four: a later 30 something mom, a slightly younger dad, a boy of 8 (we will call Helper Boy), and a tiny girl of 4 (we will call Pumpkin).  We are currently living in a townhouse in a small town in Southern Ontario, Canada.  Our dream is to move to a small homestead in the country and become as self reliant as possible.

For now we are very restricted in what we do but are putting a good effort into our dream while saving, saving, saving.  I do a lot of reading and research, and we have a few starter animals that we can keep in our home.  I garden every year; in the ground, pots, planters, ect. in the hopes of learning as much as I can and cutting down on our food budget.

I will be blogging about our research, trial and error, and experiences on a very large range of topics.  I will be learning to blog as I go and will later be able to add pictures and the like.
Maybe someone might like to read about the ridiculousness of our lives.

Melissa