Laundry Day Living Off Grid | Portable Mini Washer and Spin Dryer

so good morning everyone we have got something very exciting planned for the day we are doing laundry at our cabin it's laundry day and we figured we wanted to bring you guys along we actually have something very new and exciting in our lives that we wanted to share with you but first i want to go over how we've done our laundry in the past we've been living here for a little over two years and we have predominantly been doing our laundry off-grid so to speak or doing it here at our house and we're also going to be making some detergent you may have seen a previous laundry video where we showed you our setup i'm just going to give you a quick rundown of how we have been doing it and just kind of what worked and what didn't work so the first two things that we got when we moved here or soon after moving here was this plunger which is a clothes plunger or i think it's called like a breathable plunger so it's specifically meant for doing clothes and then we also have a clothes ringer over here these two items may be self-explanatory this is what actually like plunges your clothes and cleans them and this is the part that rings it you know we weren't going to have a dryer and we don't have a dryer so we utilize our our wood stove and the warm temperature of the house or the summer temperatures outside in the summer to dry our clothes you may be interested why we would ever want to do laundry this way it seems very labor intensive and just i mean why would you not just have like a washer and a dryer well we have a smaller solar system here and we try to limit our energy needs so that was kind of out of the question to have a big appliance like that also space we just do not have space for that and if you put anything outside it freezes in the winter all winter long so that was also not an option for us this just seemed like a fail-proof way to do laundry save money you know cheaper than the laundromat and also just more at our convenience we could do it when we wanted to although i'm super thankful for laundromats they're just a little bit costly in my opinion which i understand i'm just trying to be a little more frugal so we try to limit how often we go there we do go to a laundromat occasionally to take some more really big items in or we're just so busy and we just haven't found time to do laundry we probably do laundry maybe every other week here i'm gonna jump right into the setup that we have with these two items and how we use this to or have used it to do our laundry in the past so we need two bins we'd have two bins for the clothes and you'd set up this ringer on a frame that way it's nice and sturdy for when you're cranking it to bring the clothes through so you put all your clothes your dirty clothes in one of these bins you put all your soap your warm water whatever temperature water you're using and you let it soak for a while and then you put your plunger and you know simple just keep plunging kind of just depends how long you want to do it for the longer you let the clothes soak the cleaner it will get and we found that part of the process to be super simple actually the next step is to have your ringer set up and you run the clothes through once and you put it in a new bucket with clean water on the other side so that's kind of like the rinse cycle of your washing machine and you do the same thing with the plunger you've got to plunge that close get it nice and clean on the other side and then you're going to run it through the ringer again just to a clean receptacle with no moisture and no water in it basically at that point your clothes is ready to be hung up and dried since it's not actually that dry coming out of the ringer now we did this system for about a year after the first winter we started to realize some things and make some changes and honestly the second year we have not really utilized the ringer that much and i'm going to jump into that in just a second so let's go over some pros and cons of the clothes plunger and the ringer the plunger i really have no complaints about eric has had to fixate this with some glue and a screw because it did i think eventually it came off so it's not the strongest thing in the world we have had it for two years and used it i really like it it works really well you let your clothes soak like i mentioned and as long as you have enough water it does do a good job so that's probably the only downside is you do need quite a bit of water or a taller bin with less clothes to do a good job cleaning your clothes now as far as the ringer if you have a good setup for it an area that it permanently stays and you can really get the frame on steady you know on a steady surface it's actually a really awesome thing i mean i think it could really work for a lot of people it worked for us for a while probably the biggest complaint i could see a lot of folks having is that it doesn't actually dry your clothes that well i mean it doesn't dry at all it doesn't ring it really that much so i would find i'd run our clothes through twice in order to get a lot of the water out and a lot of our clothes would still be drip drying it's not a huge deal to me because we'd hang them up in our warm cabin and by you know a few hours we wouldn't have any issues with the dripping anymore so that's something to consider because the clothes really aren't quite dry when they come out of here you know even if you do it two or three times you know you're not getting something completely dry like you would out of a washing machine we don't really consider this a downside and that's because i'm extremely stubborn and like doing my laundry at home by myself at my own convenience but definitely the energy you could say that's a downside because this is more time consuming than just putting your clothes in a electric or you know a gas dryer and this just takes more energy it takes more time and i don't mind doing it and i think a lot of people would find it convenient to do at home in fact i used to really enjoy laundry days but this leads me to the main problem and the main problem is that we live in alaska and it gets very cold in the winter i know that's obvious but we like to do our laundry outside just because it's a little bit smaller in here and it can get quite messy you know you've got a lot of water sloshing and spraying and things like that so we would we would like to use this outside and that is problematic because the water freezes even when we're doing laundry outside with hot water it still freezes because it's so cold outside and you know that's definitely us trying to do laundry outside when it's just really way too cold but again that that's where i found it just didn't work for me in fact the water would freeze on these roller bars and clothes wouldn't come through and i'd end up kind of like tugging them and pulling them through which was very problematic was stretching out her clothes i don't think it was very good for the ringer itself so what we have resorted to really for the last year is kind of not using this as much or intimately using it and just hand wringing the clothes so eric and i will hand ring our clothes and of course that way it has a lot more water in it so we'd set up a rack near our wood stove with a bin and that would catch all the water and then from there you know we could hang it in the house when it wasn't dripping anymore and it would dry that way so unfortunately we really haven't been using this in the last six months or so my opinion of this may be a little bit biased but i actually think it's very well built um it really could work for a lot of people in the appropriate situation especially if you had it somewhere where it was permanently set up because eric and i are in this for the long haul to do laundry here at the cabin we knew we needed just like a better solution what we were doing really wasn't that that great and like i said we were stretching out our clothes it really wasn't very effective and i think it really bothered eric that our clothes was so wet we never could really get a lot of the water out so it wasn't dripping all over the house we're now going to turn the camera over to what we have been talking about and something we are just so excited about this is our new mini portable washer and spinner and i'm going to be completely honest we used this maybe a week a week a half ago and i just loved it i did laundry all day it was absolutely fantastic so we're this is what we're going to be doing laundry with today and we're going to talk all about it and show you guys how it works you may already be familiar with these and it's really straightforward it has a little washer compartment i think it's a little over seven pounds capacity i forget what the spinner is but it's tiny but after today you will be amazed at how this thing works and we have it on a bucket because it drains the water out and we just have like a five gallon bucket right here so we need a little higher for gravity um really really simple simple setup that we have and it's very lightweight i'll just pick it up to show you i mean i don't even think that weighs 10 pounds that doesn't weigh very much at all let's get some laundry detergent made and then we are going to throw our first load in here so i have been experimenting with laundry detergent and making some of our own and this is the one that i've come to that i really liked i found it online it just works really well and it makes your clothes smell pretty good so you take a bar of soap pretty much any soap works there are special kinds of soaps i'm using this one that was gifted to us it's absolutely lovely actually i think it has like coconut oil just really really nice fragrant soap for laundry we're gonna be using some borax and we have super washing soda i use a 50 50 ratio of that and then i add some oxiclean mainly for stains i don't usually use that much of that now you'll find there's lots of different recipes online for laundry detergent and like i said again this is just one i found that i really liked i kind of customized the ratio to my liking we make our own soap too we have used all different kinds of soap i just try to stay away from one that's really oily i personally wouldn't use like one with lard in our clothes so i'm gonna get that shaved oh gosh this one's so good smells like laundry clean laundry so i am using about half of this bar and i'm just gonna mix it you can you can blend it do whatever you want i don't really care honestly it honestly when water warm water touches this it dissolves and that's really all i'm after other things we've tried using is we've used baking soda vinegar i don't know if i've tried peroxide but i feel like the borax and the washing soda really really really works and i do really like that it's dry it works really well for me and it's also extremely cost effective you'll see that we don't we really don't use much of this this will go this will do a lot of laundry i'm making a lot of detergent right now one thing i wanted to mention was soap berries i have some soap berries i bought these a while back actually for hair needs and also for laundry but i personally found that i i didn't really care for them i don't know why they just for me they didn't really work the way i had wanted them to i wanted to mention it because they're really cool they are a berry or nut that grows that actually like lathers and has like soap qualities to it it's very interesting so we are going to try some of these today and show you guys how they work and we will see how they work with the new portable washer so we are ready to get started i'm going to put some of this detergent in there i'm probably going to use maybe about two tablespoons that's just preference so that's about how much i like to use and it's time to fill this up first day that we tried this machine out we found we were using anywhere from four to five gallons of water in this side and we have a few different ways that we heat up our water here so in the winter months we utilize the wood stove we try to heat water up that way we also have a storage tank in the house that we fill from our well every few days we have some tubing in here to our tankless water heater which comes with the shower head and the shower head is actually my main way of filling up this border washer that's what i'm going to be doing for the first few loads while the water on the wood stove heats up i have a really long shower head and i usually just put it in there i personally like to use warm water when we're doing laundry it just cleans our dirty clothes much better and our water feeder is in celsius so we usually go 40 to 50 degrees uh celsius i'm not actually sure what this is but i think it was for some sort of detergent so that's what we're going to be trying to put our soap berries in this today and then putting it on top we have three knobs on the washer one is a timer for washing the clothes one's a timer for the spinner and one is kind of to set it to drain or not drain and so right now we have it on not draining because we're filling it up this little guy did not come with many instructions but one thing i did read is you want to stay away from extremely hot water just because it's a plastic setup and so i don't keep it like scalding hot i do you know warm maybe bath temperature i'm going to start putting in our clothes because the clothes absorbs water and it just affects my volume in there and so we're going to do lots of big things today which is very exciting this is a huge it's not huge but it's a big jacket it's eric's jacket believe it or not i will probably be able to fit a few more items in there i'm gonna let that soak up the water first though we're gonna put two little items of mine so this will all squish down actually and soak up the water but what we found once it starts spinning is you really want to have a good ratio of water to close in there for it to do the proper job with its agitation and add in two kitchen towels and i think that's all i'm going to be adding to this load so clearly it depends on what size items you're doing if you're doing small stuff like socks and you know under clothes um you do lots of those 30 50 a lot of those but if you're doing a jacket and a few bigger items you can only do a few and i can actually do a blanket in this too which is very impressive i turned off the water this is the level i like it and i you know you're not supposed to fill it up completely full because when it spins it does slosh around in there there's actually a little hole back here and that i like to keep the water from going in there i'm fairly certain it can go in there and it just drains i think that's connected to this part but i just try not to fill it up all the way to that we're going to get the lid closed and we're going to start the timer but first we need to plug it in today we are not getting a lot of solar i think we're only at about five and a half hours of light daylight during the day and it's just overcast and our battery system although full we're going to be doing a few loads of laundry so eric is going to get our generator started our generator's on and we're ready to plug in just a normal outlet we have an extension cord over here and i'm going to set the timer especially now that the clothes has had a little time to absorb the detergent and soak we're going to set it for 12 minutes i usually don't go 15. i think 15 for me is like socks and really dirty items i'm gonna open up the lid and show you guys what's going on and she's spinning you can tell it's all not very pretty in there anymore really dark water and it's so powerful that it actually does twist the clothes if you do sheets or anything like that it can entwine all your clothes so i like to keep an eye on it personally i think it's really fun so the agitator goes one way for a certain time and then it stops and goes the other way quite powerful for such a little machine in my opinion now this was fairly hard for us to get shipped to alaska they don't usually ship big things like this and they do come a lot bigger we found ones online that were double even more you know bigger than double the capacity so that may be something that interests you for us portability is crucial we clearly are in our kitchen right now and our living room so we need a machine that can be moved in and out preferably probably not going to keep this outside we're going to keep it somewhere inside i figured i mentioned that when we got this it came with hoses that you can you know hook up to your sink if you have this somewhere permanent and you want to run water finishing straight into the machines of course the water is very unattractive and that's just because of our clothes you know we wear it we wear them a lot in fact some of our clothes gets worn for months before we wash it so um very very dirty clothes it's kind of really fun like i said to sit here and watch it i kind of like to just sit here and grab grab something if it's heavy it like i said that clothes our clothes absorb so much more moisture when it sits longer so sometimes i do add more water i really like this system it is so much easier than the way we used to do it and in fact i would sometimes with our old system or setup i would wash clothes in water more than once which is not good so this is a much better system i added a little more water eric's jacket is a really dense jacket it's heavy and you can hear the agitator if it has a hard time it'll kind of click because most likely because it's just too heavy and too much in there but um i i'm really precautious with this we just bought it and to me it needs to last a long time so i'm trying to take very good care of it having more volume of water helps it spin better as you can tell it's doing totally fine now so we've got three more minutes we have this gadget that our friend gave us and it tells us how much wattage this machine is using it's fluctuating as it's agitating so in the 200 mark went down there not bad that's really not bad at all um we pay attention to our wattage here with our solar system and our inverter try not to max anything out so it is all done we are going to hook unhook the hose i'm gonna put it in our five gallon bucket like i said it's good to know how much water you have in here because you don't want that to overflow and i just turned this switch to drain and we can tell our water is going down we're gonna wait until it's all the way empty and do our rinse cycle we're all done draining and i'm gonna put the hose back up and we're just going to dump this in our sink that's just what's easiest for me i put the hose back down in the 5 gallon bucket so it's going to be ready to drain once we finish our rinse cycle so the clothes is in here i'm gonna get my hose back in there or my shower head and i'm gonna turn it back on turn the water back on so it fills up [Music] so what we're mimicking here is the rinse cycle of a washing machine kind of like our previous setup we would run it through the ringer once and then put it in a clean bucket you know squish it down again clean it and then run it back through the ringer again and although this machine does not spin the clothes you know doesn't get all of that water out i found it to be very effective this is definitely the cleanest our clothes has ever come out doing laundry at home so we are ready to rinse this for our second time generally i go for about 10 minutes i go for a little less i just found it doesn't need as much time and again this is preference it's totally your choice you can run the timer twice i found a lot of people online were okay doing that too they'd run the first batch longer and then the second time rinsing it they do less time our rinse timer is done and i'm gonna drain i'm also going to get the spinner open as well it comes with this little plastic fitting that goes on the top we're gonna take that out for now this thing is so cool you don't have to wring out the stuff in fact i mean you can i probably will but you don't have to do that you can put it in there totally soppy and it'll get all the water out the jacket's a little bit big to go in there with all this other stuff the spinner works so much better when it's full so let's see how this works because there's only a few items in there and you push down the lid and you put this back but first very important i actually need to drain our five gallon bucket because there is a large amount of water in that too and we will overfill if i don't do that what i've discovered is that the middle selection switch can be on standard because the standard is what controls the washer and so the spinner actually just will just drain when you start the timer so be aware of that we're gonna start the timer it's going really fast now you cannot lift the lid up it will stop the process so i can't show you guys what's going on in there i'm extremely impatient if you couldn't tell so i've set my timer for three minutes and in fact i usually only do five it's something that has a lot of water like a blanket or eric's jacket we're probably gonna go for five but this thing is wicked i mean it gets all of that water out i'll show you guys when we're done takes a minute to stop spinning then we can get in there and her stuff is like just crazy dry i mean it's not dry but it just seems it seems really dry in fact nothing we have ever pulled out of here has dripped not one little tiny drop that's how dry it is so we will be putting this aside and we're gonna be hanging up our clothes once we get more of it done okay now we're gonna do the jacket i'm not gonna squish any water out of the jacket because like i said this machine can do it on its own i know it seems very full and it is but believe it or not what i found is this thing works better when it's full because it just doesn't get out of balance when you have a few things in there it starts to spin and then it throws things to the side and it it can't actually spin successfully so this even though it's totally cramped should be fine we're going to set this for five minutes okay until it's doing good when it gets that fast motion so the spin dryer does use less energy 160 or so wattage and it's it's for you know it's pretty consistent for however long the timer is going so we're gonna check the water we may not need to let it go the full five minutes and the hose it's not really trickling anymore there's really no water coming out so i'm gonna shave the last minute off of our dryer it's crazy how dry it is totally totally dry again it's not actually dry it's just really really dry generally if our cabin's pretty warm and we put this on our second story something like this done our old way would take several hours to dry if not a full 24 hours maybe even a little bit longer this we're finding this kind of stuff's drying like fast within a few hours some of it sometimes it's a little bit faster than that too i wish i could show you guys how dry this is we're getting started on our second load of laundry and i already have the detergent in there we're filling it up with water and we are going to try using these soap berries and this load that's what they look like and pretty interesting they actually like i said get very soapy and have kind of a pineapple really sweet smell actually so we're gonna just put two in there the cool thing about the soap nuts is they last for a really long time i have used them with our laundry and you could just use them over and over again and we're just gonna try and see if it works with this in this load i have a towel like a big body towel a small towel and one fleece jacket i may put one more item in there i may just leave it as is we're gonna see if it gets [Music] cooler [Applause] [Music] dream wow super dry we're under our third load of laundry eric has this filled up with some of the water on the wood stove and i wanted to mention that these soap nuts did not stay in this little blue thing so i'm not sure this will be very helpful for us but they're not quite totally i don't i don't want to say activated but they take a few times in hot water to start getting kind of that like lather texture they work well once they get going and and you can use them a few times i don't know if i'm gonna use them because it just seemed a little bit inconvenient for how our setup is now so i'm gonna be putting some of this in there i'm gonna add a shirt some pants another shirt some jeans some pants and i can definitely fit at least one more thing in there probably going to add even one more shirt and add a little more water we're about to get our rinse cycle going and i just wanted to mention that i have quite a few articles of clothing in there i think it fits a really good size i if it's a really good amount for the size that it is and the bigger one would obviously fit a lot more generally if you run a full load in the washer and you have to split it into two for the dryer which is no big deal or for the spinner today something we've noticed is that this machine does because it's vibrating on some of the spinning cycles it almost wanted to come off of our bin that we have flipped upside down there's these little ridges and it really needs to be on a flat surface so we're gonna have to adjust that last time we did laundry we had it on our table back there all right we are wrapping up our laundry i ended up doing six loads today i was only planning on five but it was just a good time to do it again a good experience for me because i realized that some of the bigger items i was doing today really needed to be washed by themselves so that was good for me to know but i am still really loving it it's really exceeds my expectations for what it can do for being so small these are eric's pants and carhartt so they're really thick material this is what i was talking about these kind of need to be washed on their own and they're totally almost dry one thing that's really nice about this is that you can't actually run the washer and this at the same time so i have my washer going and i'm also spin drying a you know the last load too i know i already said this but most of the items i don't dry for the full five minutes in fact closer to the three minute mark is about what i dry our stuff at and it comes out very dry well we finished up and this is what the machine looks like all cleaned out i just ran a little water through there and i just wanted to mention we have a rag down because the machine won't spill water but i spilt water and i just felt like we should put some rags down but the machine's cleaned up and it's basically ready for ready for storage and it can wait until next time and the last thing that i do is tilt the machine a little bit just to make sure it gets all the water out but i think it's yeah it's already got all the water so it may be easy to see why eric and i are absolutely in love with this new machine new add-on to our house it's very practical and realistic for us we had to run our generator today because of the conditions outside but normally if this was a sunny day we had longer light hours or if it was summer we would not need to do that that's really nice looking forward from here out and i know there's lots of different ways to accomplish doing laundry at home we're going to go ahead and link all this stuff in our description today and some information on laundry detergent too if you're interested at all i did want to mention the cost of everything so if i remember correctly this plunger ran me closer to i think 30 dollars and our ringmaster clothes ringer was 160. so pretty expensive but it's a really nice nice um setup and i mean it's really still held up very well especially if you're using it appropriately and have a nice sturdy frame for it or stand and the portable washer was actually a hundred and fifty dollars so quite the steel in my opinion for that and i just hope it lasts us for several years to know that we've kind of got our money's worth i was actually very hesitant to buy that because i didn't really want to add on to what we have i didn't really feel like it was necessary eric was really the one who researched it we found a lot of positive feedback people really liked it and in fact a lot of people were using it in situations that i didn't even think about you know someone had like a cleaning business and that was what they did some of their rags in uh people who lived in apartments it was pretty functional for them and convenient of course doing laundry at home just is convenient you don't have to go to the laundromat and it also saves you money too i hope you guys enjoyed this video and i have to hang up all the clothes that we cleaned today you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 476,142

Rating: 4.9166718 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, off grid vlog, alaska vlog, homestead alaska, cabin life, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin, daily life off grid, winter in alaska, off the grid, solar system alaska, living in a tiny house, cabin in alaska, winter cabin living, homestead off grid, tiny home storage, clothes wringer, clothes plunger, easy laundry setup, laundry living off grid, homemade laundry detergent, portable washer spin dryer, tiny home alaska, tiny house laundry

Id: YmC3dtiol5c

Length: 31min 24sec (1884 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020