How much does your laundry cost?
As a city dweller living in an apartment without an in unit washer or dryer I have the lovely option to wash my clothes in the apartment laundry room full of 1970’s washers and dryers that take quarters (hasn’t someone figured out a card system for this yet?). Lets take a look at how much time and money are involved in doing your own laundry:
Time:
- From start to finish (including folding and assuming the machines work) = 2.5 hour
Money:
- Detergent and dryer sheets = $.25
- Cost to run one washer = $1.25
- Cost to run one dryer = $1
- Sub-Total = $2.5
- Total (adding in the fact that machines never work) = $3.5/load of laundry
My first and second experience with my shared facilities were a disaster. Two of the washers and two of the dryers did not work out of five total each. I ended up spending nearly twice as much as I would have. With that said, I started doing some digging to find out my options. The best option I could find to start was a service where I could drop off my laundry and have them wash, dry and fold my laundry for $.80/lb.
This naturally begs the question of ‘how many pounds are in a load of laundry’? From my research, I found consensus around the 8 pound mark making a load of laundry via the service about $6.40. The other major factor is time. The only time involved is walking to and from the facility which takes about 15 minutes each way. Let’s look at the differences:
- DIY - Costs $3.5 per load and takes about 2.5 hours
- W&F - Costs $6.4 per load and takes about 30 minutes
The result is the same as asking is your time worth more than $1.50 per hour? I surely hope so! I know that there will be some points brought up on the following so I’ll address them now:
- 2.5 hours to wash your laundry is not all busy time: I agree, you are able to do things like read a book, watch TV, talk on the phone, etc while your laundry is in process. However, even if we adjust the time to 1 hour, is an hour of your time worth $6?
- As you add more loads, the equation changes: I agree, over-time the more loads you have the less effective this is, but I could easily note that it would take longer to do more loads as well.
The bottom-line is to use your time and money effectively. In this case I generally pay about $20 every 2 or more weeks to have all of my laundry done and it takes a total of 30 minutes of my time.
Do others use a service? Are there other types of services?
Your time is only worth more than $1.50 an hour if you can actually put that time in somewhere and make that money. I can say my time is worth $1000/hour but unless I get someone to actually pay that its a moot point.
Agreed.
The other perspective is to look at what you can do with the time savings and apply a value to that. For example in the 2 hours saved, if you are able to wash and wax your car (lets say that is $30 of labor) then you have just earned $15 an hour while doing your laundry would have only paid $1.50 per hour.