Laundry can become one of the family’s most dreaded task in no time. It is a recurring task that is mindless, takes a lot of time and mental energy to deal with and has very little reward besides not having to purchase new clothes every week. But while there are many ways to make it tolerable, getting new machines that take less time, involving the whole family or even outsourcing it, there are few times when we consider that it could be wasting our money without us even noticing, which for those who hate the chore, it makes it even more outrageous.
How to save money while doing laundry
Our machines come with many programs “pre set” that are meant to make our lives easier, after all, that way we do not need to ponder for five minutes how to wash our curtains or our delicates if there is a pre set program with that name included in the machine. But although those programs can be really great and useful, there is one that we tend to use that can not only cost us more money at the end of the month, but also damage our machine faster and cost us more money in the long run.
The program that will bring us this much headache is none other than the express wash program. It is quite helpful sometimes, after all if you only have one piece of laundry or you did not soil your clothes too much (maybe they are clean clothes that can from a trip or bag that you just do not want to put back in the closet, but you never wore and the happy compromise was to just lightly run them through the wash) wasting an enormous amount of time on laundry just seems ridiculous, but the time saved on the experience comes with the tradeoff of it being more expensive.
The first way in which they cost more money, is that quick programs use a lot more energy than longer cycles, and that is because the machine has a lot less time to get the water up to temperature or to gain speed when it reaches the spin cycle. It is also not able to “waste time” balancing the clothes that you just shoved in on order to guarantee a more calm wash cycle and so it supplements that with energy expended to move the clothes around quicker.
All of this requires more energy with not that many savings on water consumption or even washing liquid, so the expenses just rise without optimal results.
The fact that the machine is also forced to make all the changes and follow all the steps quicker also means undie strain in the different parts involved. Let us take heating up the water to wash the clothes. Even if you wash in “cold” water might still be at a temperature that is too low for an efficient wash, so the machine heats it up. Because all parts of the machine are cold (like for example the tubing) when it hurries up to heat the water it will use more power to do so quicker and the components will go from cold to really hot in the span of just and handful of minutes when it would normally take a fair amount of time and would be progressive.
This amount of strain can wear out certain parts of the machine, especially those that are known fail points or junctions that are not meant to take that much pressure suddenly. This does not just mean that one part will need to be replaces, it usually causes even more damage, both to the machine and to the home and can mean a total replacement and a quite high expense.