Thursday, February 19, 2009

How not to arrange for clean clothes

When I found myself without a convenient way to get to and from the town that's about 12 miles away, there was one aspect both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that I had an excuse to no longer use laundromats. I really hate laundromats, but sometimes they're the most convenient way to achieve a hamper full of clean clothes. The curse was, of course, that I no longer had any good way to get to a laundromat, and how the hell was I going to wash my clothes? I'm a hermit, not a slob.

At first I washed and rinsed things in a bucket. This would have worked better if I'd had a bigger bucket, but of course that requires more water, which since I'm a wimp requires more hot water, and hot water's an issue, so I was using that five-gallon bucket rather frequently. It was a pain.

Then I was helping a friend move out of a house in town, and among other goodies she was getting rid of a washing machine.

A washing machine! Hell, why not just offer me a box that makes gold bars! Actually, that wouldn't be as useful as a washing machine. I took it on the spot, having no idea in this world how I'd actually get it to work.

Okay: What does a washing machine need? It needs electricity, of course: Check. If the system couldn't take the load, I'd just run the generator. It needs water. Hm. Well, cold water was doable. I'd just run a hose from the valve house, around these trees, over this fence, through the Gitmo yard and into the power shed where I'd parked the machine. Okay, check. It needs drainage. Hm. No sewers around here, but that's okay again! I scrounged a couple of lengths of PVC that the drain hose would fit into, ran it across the Gitmo yard and down the slope. The junipers would thank me. Check.

I ran the machine like this a few times, and everything seemed fine. I did learn that it was vitally important not to let the agitator start until the pressure pump had filled and shut off, or the power output spiked to damned near 85 amps, but that's just good power management. Yeah, everything seemed fine.

On the third or fourth time I used the washer, I found that it had stopped without filling the drum. When I checked to see what the hell was happening to the water, I found that the inlet screen on the washer was completely plugged with red mud. I cleaned out the screen, put the hose back on, went to the valve house to open the valve, went back to the machine, turned it on. It filled for maybe ten seconds and then stopped again. I went back to the valve house, shut the water back off, removed the hose again, and...the inlet screen was plugged with red mud.

Hmph. I pulled the hose right out of the power shed, turned the valve on, and let water run out on the yard for a few minutes. Then I hooked everything up, and this time it worked fine.

Until next time, when I had to go through the whole thing again. There's a lot of sediment on the bottom of the cistern, and it seems that the valve house outlet we use for hoses gets it all; there's sediment at the other faucets, but none of them plug up like this. So every time I want to wash clothes I have to disconnect the water line from the washer and let the water run first, to clean out the pipes and hose. As long as I follow that little ritual, everything's fine.

When you're off-grid, it seems, little chores you never think much about in suburbia can end up taking quite a bit more time.

2 comments:

The last cause said...

Hmm...can you add a "Y" at the connection to the cistern?

Or perhaps a "U" with a drain plug on the bottom to trap the sediment before it makes it down the hose?

The last cause said...

If I can post hog for a moment, instead of a "U" or a "Y", you could run the water into a barrel with the cistern line going into the bottom and the out line running to the washing machine.

The bottom of the barrel will trap the sediment, the water at the top would run freely to the washing machine?


A pitcock on the barrel would let you drain the water and you could then dump the sediment out when you had to clean the thing.