My simple laundry routine was born out of necessity. Living off-grid, doing laundry can be quite a challenge depending on the seasons and the amount of sun we get. Working around the complications while also keeping six people in clean clothes has been a challenge that I can now say isn’t the hardest part of my week! Even if you don’t live off-grid, even if you just have small kids or a busy schedule, I hope you can glean some ideas from my simple laundry routine!
Besides animal chores, laundry is one of those big necessary tasks that can get really overwhelming. It can so easily become a Beast in a matter of days. This is especially true living off grid. That is why a laundry routine is so important.
Why doing laundry is complicated off grid:
I don’t have a dryer, and I don’t have a means of washing laundry in a predictable way. The washing machine is dependent on the sunlight shining on the panels in order to have enough electricity to work. This means:
- No laundry at night
- No laundry with clouds
- No laundry when there’s snow on the panels
- No laundry if I’ve already done a couple loads in the winter (because it takes 24 hours at least for the laundry to dry in the house and I don’t have enough room for more than two loads)
We can easily go a week or two without doing laundry. Which means if I am a week behind on laundry and it snows, we are toast.
My simple laundry routine
There are things that I have done to simplify and streamline the laundry process to make it easier for me. And now, almost five years into living off-grid, I realize that my friends in town have a much harder time conquering laundry than I do.
I really think that the reason for this is that it is such a Beast when the laundry pile builds up. And I don’t let it build up. I totally remember that when I lived in town. It was such an easy and mindless task to start a load of laundry and throw it in the dryer in an hour. But then, the real challenge came when the laundry basket would fill, and I didn’t have time to sort and fold and put away.
That is really where the laundry hangup comes in. I remember that laundry basket filling up, and the laundry piling over the sides, and soon, it would be scooted to a corner and left for “later.” Before I knew it, we had gone a week living out of a laundry basket.
I’ve talked to my friends in town about laundry before and told them my system. And sometimes the response I get is, “oh no, once a week works so well for me.”
But I really think that’s because they are thinking of laundry in terms of a Face the Beast Day, and not like a five-minute daily task as difficult and time consuming as brushing your teeth.
My laundry routine method:
Every day, I look at the sun. And I look at the time. I have to change it based on what time of year it is, but there is a time in the summer and a time in the winter, and they are different. (Because the sun hits the panels later in the winter and earlier in the summer) Sometimes I go out and stand in front of the panels and look at the sun to calculate when is the best time to do laundry.
If it’s sunny and the panels have been getting some light for a half hour, I do a load of laundry as soon as I can. I search the house for every dirty item of clothing and do a load. I don’t sort colors; I don’t do anything fancy. I throw stuff in and start the washer. As soon as it’s done, I put it in a laundry basket and put it somewhere very in-the-way if I can’t get to it immediately.
If I don’t put the wet laundry somewhere I’ll trip over, I might forget to hang the laundry.
As soon as I have time I hang the laundry. If it’s summer I hang it outside. If it’s winter I hang it on the balcony and on two indoor laundry hangers I have. But before I do this, I pull all of yesterday’s clothes off of the balcony railing and fold it and put it away. I don’t wait for it to pile up, I don’t think about Facing the Beast. I just do it.
I do this every day, weekday or not, and it is so easy. It’s amazing how nice it is to have clothes back in your drawers folded and put away.
My laundry routine: A couple things to make laundry easier:
I fold only a few things.
Napkins, my clothes, Ben’s clothes, cloth diapers and towels. I don’t fold the kids clothes at all. They will ruin the folding job anyway so it’s a complete waste of time.
I minimize our laundry.
This is actually really hard for me to do because of our situation. If we have to go two weeks without washing laundry, I need two weeks’ worth of clothes for everyone. But in our modern consumer-driven society, it’s very easy to have much more than two week’s worth of clothes. I get rid of everything that is too worn out or the kids just don’t use them.
I have only a few laundry baskets.
There’s one in our master bedroom, which I use to collect all the upstairs laundry. There’s one in the pantry next to the washing machine, and there’s one hanging around the house. We actually use that one more for hauling wood into the house and for the kids to clean up the house than for laundry.
If there are baskets, it is just too easy for them to get filled up and shoved somewhere.
I air dry things first.
If there is a winter storm on the forecast, I will intentionally hang dirty wet towels and socks to dry before I put them in the dirty laundry pile. This means my laundry won’t stink by the time I can finally get around to washing it.
My Laundry Routine: So how can I go a couple weeks without clothes?
I have town clothes and home clothes for both me and all the kids. They each have a few “more presentable” outfits to wear into town, and the rest I don’t worry about getting stained. We don’t go to town very often, although as they get older, I will need to focus more on getting them out of the house and playing with friends. We live so far from town that one visit with friends takes half the day. So, I spend the whole day in town visiting with people. And then people come up to visit me if the roads aren’t too snowy or muddy.
The town clothes for all the kids sit in a drawer with all the Sunday clothes. I keep them in my dresser because I don’t want the kids to know where they are, and they are still young enough for me to pick out their clothes on Sundays!
My Laundry Routine: A note on cloth diapering off-grid
I cloth diaper, and I do elimination communication with all my kids from birth. I will need to do separate posts about both of these things, but I wanted to mention that I can manage to cloth diaper while living off grid, and some of the same tricks apply to my cloth diaper system.
- I dry all the diapers. While I am doing laundry every day most days, there are often weeks where I can’t get any laundry done. The fact that I can’t control that means the laundry can’t be disgusting. And cloth diapers are one of those things that can become really gross. So as soon as I change the baby’s diaper, I hang the prefold to air dry. People have asked me if it smells bad, but I think because I only use diapers on the baby, there is no smell. I find it much more sanitary and less revolting than a diaper pail!
- I try to do EC for the poops. EC means elimination communication, a method of learning your baby’s signals and patterns to eliminate. It’s a very hygienic, gentle approach to caring for your baby. You can try to “catch” however many pees or poops you want. I try to catch the poops and not worry about the rest. This means I don’t have gross poopy dirty diapers.
- I do all the laundry together. Because there aren’t poopy diapers, I am able to put all the laundry in the same load and not find it gross.
