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 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, along with our gas dryers, gas stoves and ovens, only allowing them to be pried from our cold dead fingers.
Piece of Mindful 
What’s wrong with the “old fashioned” clothes-line?
~Pepperidge Farms Remembers
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Yes, I have to say the only time I’ve used a dryer is for six months when I lived in a studio apartment in NY with two others with no washing machine. In another shared studio apartment in NY I relied on the central heating, also when I lived in London. In Sydney, I just use “outside”.
A friend told a very funny story about going on a date with a guy whose apartment held no dinnerware or cutlery apart from plastic and paper but who told her he bought a dryer first thing on arriving from South Africa – she on the other hand had never felt the need for one. I have one in my apartment but have never used it in 5 years and I’m not sure it works properly anyway.
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We had them on a drying rack, but humidity and rain interfered.
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Fair enough. I always think one day I’ll need the dryer … but so far that day hasn’t come.
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What a drag to go through!!
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Here in Frisco they talk big about banning this and that (currently plastic bags are banned, sort of) but the rich, which is pretty much all we have left here, will find the inconvenience worse than saving mother Gaia and eventually we get our modern conveniences restored. I have a washer/dryer and am the envy of the few remaining libtard proles I still speak to.
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Hey Tyrone I thought calling SF “Frisco” is considered an insult by outsiders. Like calling Boston “Beantown”. Many years ago I used to listen to Michael Savage (don’t judge me please) and he called it San FranPsycho.
But back to heat pumps and energy scams. I did mention this in comments the past month about the energy audit scam they are running hard here in “Beantown” and the ‘burbs. This is how it works: they call, and put solicitors at various strategic locations (e.g. as you walk into Home Depot) to ask if you’d like an energy saving audit. So far so good. They sent a couple of competent young women to my house, which is very well insulated, yet 50 years old, so not a sealed environment like some modern construction where they have no air flow to minimize energy consumption – like those F-ing hotels everywhere where they don’t let you open the windows – some apartments are even like that.
The assessment I got back I was pleased they noted my attics and windows were well insulated, but they suggested i replace my oil burning heat furnace with a heat pump to “get off fossil fuels”. Yeah right. So I should rip out a beautifully built German oil burning furnace, that is very efficient and heats the house perfectly, for a reasonable cost, with little maintenance, for a brand new system, with central heating and AC, that I don’t need, since I just use window ACs a few weeks a year when it gets too hot. No doubt the heat pump would cost me several thousand dollars, and lock me into only heating my house through the electric company, which is the one pushing the energy audit.
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Oh yeah because the natural gas supply was supposedly cut off by the war with Ukraine, when the CIA or Russia fake blew up the pipeline, when I’m sure they just turned the valve and set off a few cherry bombs. Maybe they have gas piped into the old money estates in Europe.
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good article from mainstream comedy for you Mark:
https://babylonbee.com/news/update-we-now-have-only-12-seconds-left-until-climate-change-destroys-the-planet
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I’m not embarrassed to admit that I, too, used to listen to Michael Savage when he was on in my area.. not the typical talk radio talker at all. I remember he used to call Rush Limbaugh a “normalopath,” who was “well suited to midday radio, and that’s fine, that’s good,” but he (Savage) was more of a nighttime Id type, who would often ditch politics entirely and just go off on strange rants, reflections or reminiscence. I think he had some sort of arty/ bohemian background, as well as science and research maybe? Forget exactly, but it was all a strange mix, compounded with his rabid, acerbic and satirical conservative politics.. and for that matter, Rush was a strange cat too, though maybe relatively “normalopathic”..
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