Pump this …

While planning for our soon-ending trip, we decided to avoid checking bags and so minimized stuff to bring. We rented several dwelling units of various types, most having washers and dryers. Thereby, and you neither want nor need to know this, I brought only four skivvies and several pairs of socks that qualify as hiking grade.

The first place where we did laundry had an odd machine, and a dial completely written in Portuguese. I translated it, and thought I understood the machine to be basically normal. However, at the end of the washing and spinning cycle our clothes were soaking wet. I ran them again, same result, and then on a cycle that promised to spin them really fast, which it failed to do. We ended up with a load of soaking-wet clothes and a small deck to dry them on. I wrung them out by hand.

FInally, on what I later decided was a fool’s quest, I went searching for a laundromat. It took several hours to find one,  get change, and finally run our clothing that otherwise refused to dry. The machine I used had a heat button, but I could not make it hotter. I ran the clothing for two fifteen-minute intervals, and while not dry, the items were kind of warm,  and seemed to have been in the process that may well have required three our four more fifteen-minute cycles. I decided the machine was defective.

I then took the remaining undried remnants, those things that absolutely could not be dried by any other means, and put the in the microwave. That pretty much got the job done, damage to waistbands be damned. On leaving I did let the owners know I thought the wash machine in the unit was defective, but on reflection decided they know this and would not be fixing it, as there was no mechanism by which past occupants could warn newer ones. Since we were tourists, it was understood that we were never coming back.

Finally, in a unit that had both washer and dryer, we were able to wash laundry normally. The drying process was excruciatingly long, almost two hours, and in the end the clothing seemed lukewarm and damp. We ran it some more, and then again. In our final unit with washer/dryer, same result.

I read this article by Paul Homewood … Milliband to ban tumble dryers“. I know more than most about this stuff, but not about dryers. I know that Ed Milliband, Energy Secretary for Britain, is not, appearances aside, a moron. He is commissioned to make life harder and harder for Britans, and uses the CO2 hoax as his tool. He is pushing the population into energy poverty, and don’t be smug, he is our future too. Britain is an experiment and foreshadowing. We can’t all live in Texas, where they don’t pay much attention to imbeciles.

Milliband wants all tumble dryers to be run by heat pumps, and not natural gas. Heat pumps have one small defect that even after decades of promotion, they have not solved. They don’t work very well in warm weather, and in cold weather, forget it. In the Homewood article I learned, somewhere it, that heat pumps are already standard in the rest of the European Union. A light went on. Of course! This is why we could not find a machine that actually efficiently dried clothes. They don’t allow natural gas to be used!

People my age remember the Maytag repairman, a humorous ad campaign that pictured a lonely guy playing solitaire in his shop, a Maytag repair shop. The machines never broke, and indeed, in the world of advertising lies, Maytag machines actually live up to claims. We have one we’ve been using now for fifteen years, never failing, and efficiently drying clothing in 15-30 minutes. The clothes come out hot, because it takes heat to evaporate water. Just air will get it done, but it takes hours!

As with our ICE’s, internal combustion engines, slowly being replaced by nice but less serviceable EVs, we intend to hang on to them, our gas dryers, gas stoves and ovens, only allowing them to be pried from our cold dead fingers.