Washing Laundry Off Grid
- By : Sarah
- Category : Off Grid Utilities
- Tags: laundry

We normally have to use the laundromat for clothes washing, we just don’t have the room in the tiny house to dry all the clothes we wear. But now that it’s nice out, I can start doing laundry here.
First you get the water. If we used the rainwater to wash clothes, we would run out too quickly. So we (he) haul the water from the stream. With this fancy new yoke the Man made himself.
I use hot water to wash. About 1.5 gallons of hot water and a gallon of cold will wash 5 adult tops and 5 adult pants.
We have this great plunger washer and a five gallon bucket. After you plunge away for a while, you wring out the clothes and rinse them the same way. I wash half a load at a time and rinse it all together. After everything is rinsed and wrung out again, throw it on the line.
For extra dirty clothes, I prewash in the grungy rinse water. The kids love to help with this. Especially since it’s their grungy, mud pie makin’ clothes.
Wring everything out again and hang.
Two loads of laundry done. Ten tops and ten bottoms in ten gallons of water. And everything comes through just as clean as a regular washer. It doesn’t take any more time than it would to go to the laundromat either, we have drive to town for the that.