Please Help Me Choose

[Leta]

I am going to invest in some hand washing laundry equipment. Specifically, I am looking for things to get water out of clothes.

I would love a wringer (aka mangle) and DH and I have been pondering him building one. However, the neccesary bearings cost $40 each and we'd need 4 of them. Eeek! So I have been looking at them online. Of the brand new ones, I am leaning toward this one , simply because there are replacement parts available. But the price is a bit of a heart stopper- it's almost $200 after shipping. And, frankly, it's not huge. For that kind of money, I want a really big one that I can fit blankets through.

I have also been looking at antique wringers on eBay. This one seems to be the one up most frequently, and it is pretty affordable, it usually goes for around $50. But it is very small, under 10", and twenty minutes of googling leads me to believe that there are no replacement parts to be found.

Right now, I'm using a regular size salad spinner. This works GREAT for things that are small, have lots of fasteners, and are blended with synthetic fabrics. It's ideal for bras, for example.
So I thought, what I need is a commercial, 5 gallon salad spinner. These cost about $120 new, and you can find replacement parts easily. They are also manual, so no electrical use at all, and easy to fix with simple tools when the time comes.

There are also electric spinners (a.k.a extractors) designed specifically for laundry. The smaller one costs $70 and uses 82W, so it uses a teeny amount of electricity. It spins at 1600 rpm, which, I am afraid, I would not get up to manually. It's big brother uses a bit more electricity, costs $150, but goes up to 3200 rpm and holds 7x the laundry of the little one.

Yet another choice is theLaundryPod. This little guy isn't quite as big as the commercial salad spinner, about 3 gallons, but it has the nice advantage of being an all in one unit- it has a hose, with a valve, so you can keep the water in for washing or let it out when it's time to spin/rinse. (A regular salad spinner has no way to keep water in, it's like a colander.) It is entirely non-electric. It's $90, including shipping, but it's one of those things that's like a modern toaster- ain't no hope of fixing the thing once it's toast, you just have to get a new one.

I'd really like one of each type: a wringer and a spinner.

So, any thoughts? Please help me decide what to get!

 

[2dream]

If your husband can build you exactly what you want for $160.00 I personally would go that route. That means you can always have it fixed. Compared to all the other ones $160.00 for exactly what you want is a steal.

 

[Marianne]

Having always used a washing machine, I'm just guessing here...

But isn't the worst part of doing laundry without electricity the wringing out? I recently read on another forum that the $200 wringer was worth it's weight in gold as far as that guy was concerned.

I always thought I'd do the 5 gallon bucket along with soaking and the vented laundry plunger. We had a wringer that I had scrounged, but when we were cleaning out a while back, DH said the rollers were shot.....hmmmmmm......... I still wonder if he was just trying to get rid of it, you know? Another way I was going to wring was to use a mop bucket. But it's just the two of us. For your family, you'd need a good system to handle extra laundry.

If it was me, and DH is on board, I'd sure explore the idea of him building something with your input and consider spending the $$ up front for something that you'll probably get a lot of usage through the years. It should pay for itself in short order. JMO

 

[Leta]

Well, it would be considerably more than $160. That's just the bearings. We'd also have to get the handle and crank machinery, as well as the wood and some sort of tightening mechanism. It would cost closer to $250 when it was all said and done.