Doing Your Laundry on the Road

How to do laundry on the road

I’m about to do my favorite chore and I’m sure its yours as well. Washing on the road. We have all got to do it and we all wear clothes and you know they need freshening up. First ingredient is we actually have a wonder, a little tumbler machine. It is brilliant. It takes six liters of water to do a load of washing, which is great for us because it is just the two of us living on the road.

Here we have a container of water. Its recycled water. We unscrew this lid because originally it was a drinking water container and when we are heating up the water for our shower we capture the water in here so we are not wasting water, because as you all know water is a really precious resource. So that is my ten liters of water there. It will take about six liters of water for a load of washing and because we use the magic wool wash and a lot of people do use Marthas wool mix over some of the cheaper alternatives. This product is brilliant. You do not need to rinse your washing when you use this. Grey nomads told me that and thousands of travelers all around the world use wool wash for washing their clothes. For this size wash you only need about two tea spoons of wool wash. You can either whack your clothes in, give it a quick spin and put them straight out after you hand wring them, great for the old hand muscles, or you can just put it in, stir it up and let it soak for a while just like you would at home sometimes.

So we are going to unscrew the lid of the washing machine. It has an air lock some people use instead of one of these a big old container or a big bucket with a lid that they just pop there water and clothes into and let it sit in their bathroom as they are traveling and hey presto when they get to their destination their washing is done because of the agitation when you are driving. Alright now you just very carefully pour your water in. Always try to make sure you capture your water when you are going to have your shower because you know whether you use it for doing your washing or to just keep in a container or put in your sink throughout the day so you have somewhere to wash your hands instead of turning the tap on and off all the time. So about two teaspoons, not much just a little bit. Who ever bothers measuring now days. I don’t, and then you pop your clothes in. There is two pairs of shorts, a couple of shirts and yes a pair of jeans will actually go in this wash. So I actually thought no way would I be able to wash jeans in this little baby but surprisingly you can with a little more water. You want that water to be able to slosh around the clothes. Put lid on air lock nice and tight because you don’t want it leaking when you spin it around. This is for when we rinse or drain out the water and it takes a little bit to get all the clothes wet and that is how you do your washing on the road. Spin for about three minutes. I’m a fan of letting it sit and giving the detergent a chance to soak in and get all the little yucky bits out of the clothes, all the dust because as you can see around us there is lots of dust everywhere even though we have had some rain, its always dusty.

Hello Charlie. Charlie just had to come and say hello. Looks like he has been digging by the looks of his nose. looks like he needs to have a wool wash bath to and that’s another thing with wool mix is if you get stuck and your little fur baby gets really dirty you can actually give them a bath in a little bit of wool wash and it doesn’t aggravate their skin and again they don’t need rinsing,  just like your clothes. So its a multipurpose and has its eucalyptus smell so it smells really, really fresh Charlie is a little bit upset because he is on his lead because there was little bit of a dingo wondering around last night so when Mick took Charlie for a walk and this morning Charlie could smell something around that he didn’t like. He rushed back to the motorhome so that’s why he is on his lead for his own protection.

And we open up the lid. I know that wasn’t three minutes but we are going to have a little look see inside and as you can see that all the clothes are wet. There are no suds like you get at home in your washing machine because of the amount of water and wool wash. Just for now if I squeeze that out there is a few tiny little suds and a really nice smell of eucalyptus so yeah if its just light stuff that’s all you need. just a quick rinse, screw them up and hang them on the clothes line which is over there and that is our little hills hoist type clothes line that when I don’t have trees, as you saw previously that I do like to string up a bit of rope between trees for a clothes ,but when we don’t have trees around us we actually do pull out that little baby. Set her up. As you can see at the bottom I’ve got a little bucket of pegs. There are some in a plastic bag because when you leave your pegs out and it rains they get wet or dusty so I just tie them up in a bag and keep them in my little container so I know where they all are and they don’t get dirty, wet or yucky. Its a great little clothes line. We can actually fit a couple loads of washing on it. It might be little but she holds a lot. It only takes a couple of minutes to put it up and pull it down. It folds up nice and compact and fits into one of the side bins in the RV motorhome. Its really just to easy. So realistically washing and doing your laundry on the road doesn’t have to be that much of a chore, so yeah that’s it. This me doing the washing on the road while we are traveling full time on the road around Australia showing you guys our backyard till next time be good be safe.
I leave you with a link to Amazon RV washing machines