The weather gets too cold for me to want to wash laundry outdoors. So it piles up, which violates the first rule of hand-washing: Don’t let it pile up. Used to do it in the sink, which was a real pain. Last winter I got this gadget…
…which does have the advantage of keeping the whole process indoors where it’s warm. But while it’s very good for agitating, it’s no damn good at all at rinsing. That takes a lot of water, and I don’t have facility for heating that much water. So my big problem with winter laundry has always been sore hands.
I think I’ve got that handled this time, though. Rubber gloves can keep your hands dry, but they have no insulation at all and the water is plenty cold. But when I bought new ones this fall I got them a bigger size. Wear them over a pair of jersey gloves, and so far that’s insulation enough. Water will get colder, of course, but so far that works well.
It’s time-consuming, since the washer doesn’t hold nearly as much as my tubs. I’ve been working on catching up for the past couple of days. Once that’s done, I’ve got to keep caught up. It’s just a matter of finding new habits.
Will Blog for ISP Time, Glaucoma Meds, or Cheap Booze.
Free! (and worth every penny)
Scary Manifesto that keeps getting pushed down on the sidebar by filthy capitalism!
They say that Louis XIV had the inscription Ultima Ratio Regum cast into all the cannon of the French Army. It means “The Ultimate Argument of Kings,” and that always struck me as one of the most honest and up-front things any ruler or would-be ruler ever said. “We can dress it up prettier than this, but when it comes down to the unvarnished truth this is what it’s about: You’ll do as I say or I’ll send my goons to kill you.”
I thought about that for a long time. If there’s an ultimate argument, it seems only logical that there must be an ultimate answer. For years I thought the ultimate answer must be the bullets in my rifle, but it never seemed quite right. I’ve got bullets – he’s got frigging Cannon Balls. I mean, if there were three hundred million rifles throwing bullets at him, then maybe. But we all know that’s not going to happen. So if there’s an ultimate answer to his ultimate argument, it sure as hell ain’t bullets.
It finally came to me – and that’s when I abandoned the city and most of my stuff, and gave all that was behind me a good stiff Randian Shrug.
The ultimate answer to kings is not a bullet, but a belly laugh.
Our Founder
Our Late Editor
Little Bear 2009-2018
Our Late Cattle Wrangler
Laddie the Amazing Torso Boy 2011-2020
Blogroll
- 357 Magnum
- 5 Acres and a Dream
- 90 Miles From Tyranny
- A Day in the Life of a Talk Radio Blogger
- Adaptive Curmudgeon
- Armed & Non-Violent
- Bayou Renaissance Man
- Bill St. Clair
- Borepatch
- Carl Bussjaeger
- Claire Wolfe
- Commander Zero
- Dio's Workshop
- Eaton Rapids Joe
- Forgotten Weapons
- Freeholder
- Home on the Range
- Instapundit
- Irons in the Fire
- James Zachary
- Kent McManigal
- Nails and Sawdust
- Never Yet Melted
- Resistance Library
- Say Uncle
- The Price of Liberty
- The Smallest Minority
- The View from North Central Idaho
- The Vulgar Curmudgeon
- The War on Guns
- The Zelman Partisans
- True Blue Sam
- View from the Porch
- Weer'd World
- Wendy McElroy
- You will shoot your eye out
- Zendo Deb
Previous OPSEC Violations
Leave a 20 quart +/- on your wood stove full when you fire it up in the morning. A couple quarts of hot water from the pot will warm up quiet a bit of cold water.bb
Typo I meant to add stock pot or old canner after 20 qt.
I wonder how much soap is actually needed. Do clothes really get that bad if you skip the soap? Or maybe use it every other time?
When you change from a top-loading washer to a front-loading one, they advise you to use no soap at all on the first loads, because the soap still in the clothes is enough, and to add more is to risk an overflow of suds.
At the advice of a writer on lewrockwell I have stopped using soap in the shower. I just scrub harder with the wash cloth. Sure is a lot easier on my skin, and my wife (who has a very sensitive nose) does not complain.
It would be just a more crude version of a front loader, but have you considered a salvaged cement mixer? One with a new drum would be nice, for no other reason than a smoother, less abrasive surface would be more gentle on fabrics. I’d guess some sort of hand crank apparatus could be rigged; maybe there’s grant money from Obama’s Dept of Energy to attach it to a windmill.
@Paul X: Eventually, if enough hydrocarbons (think grease and oil, including skin oils) are involved there will be a need for some sort of surfactant to collapse the surface tension of the water to get it out. Whether that surfactant is what we call “detergent,” aka “soap,” or a less effective chemical substitute like “salt,” or a physical substitute like “scrubbing” in its many forms, is irrelevant, but it will be required at some point.
Nosmo, a cement mixer would be awfully hard on clothes. Anyway, agitation isn’t the problem with hand washing. Agitation’s easy: A toilet plunger and a clean garbage can, and you’re in business. In my case, in summer, I’ve got one of these and two of these. Both gifts from readers, BTW. In winter, when I don’t want to be out freezing my ass off, I use one of these. But that last gadget doesn’t work worth beans for rinsing. Rinsing is very difficult without running water, which fortunately I have. The last problem was freezing hands, and it looks like I finally licked that by the simple – and in hindsight obvious – expedient of oversize rubber gloves over fabric gloves. With wind and sun, of course, even in freezing weather the drying takes care of itself. In gloomier weather I can still string a line indoors if I need to. One unexpected benefit of that new window I put in to watch over the chickens, as it turns out, is that hot sun pours through there if there’s any sun at all. I didn’t realize how much passive heat I was throwing away. I’ve already strung a line across that window for emergency stump sock drying, come the inevitable time when the weather’s too screwed up to do anything else.
Joel: Yup, I have that little plastic tumbler too, and my experience was similar to yours; took five rinse cycles before things weren’t foamy. Made me wonder if the powered washer had been doing a crappy job of rinsing, so I put a load into Mr. Hand Crank without any detergent and, surprise! a noticeable amount of suds. The miser in me took notice. Luckily, the Wonder Wash is just for backup in my case. Electricity is good.
Someone on your post about the window mentioned keeping black containers of water in the sun as a heat sink. If it’s something that would work, they would make a good source of warmer rinse water. As a bonus, using them that way would help to ensure the water got rotated out regularly so it doesn’t become stagnant or start growing things.