[nataliste]

>It works like this: after loading the clothes, detergent and water, and letting it sit for 10-15 minutes, users can close the lid and turn the handle for two minutes, repeating this twice more after ten minutes of letting the clothes sit in between spins. And voila — the machine can then be drained using the tap at the front.

I lived off-grid and did all of our laundry, a family of four (including a baby in cloth diapers), by hand, even in the winter (below -20F).

You know what works as well? A wash tub and a stick. Or a bucket and plunger. Or a posser if you're really fancy. I used a 30 gallon garbage can and a hand-carved posser. In mild or hot climates you can just stomp on it.

Same principle: Draw water, add cleanser, agitate for a couple of minutes, let it soak, return at some time in the future, agitate again. Remove laundry and let drip dry while you draw fresh water (mangles and spinners speed this up and are more effective, but not necessary). Squeeze wet laundry at lowest point where water has gathered. Repeat entire process with clean water, then lay it out in the sun prioritizing any sides with stains.

The secret sauce of clean laundry isn't how you agitate the laundry. It's just time and chemistry.

Water access, cleansing agents, and patience are fundamentally more important than providing "revolutionary" contraptions. It's the same difference between teaching people about no-knead bread and giving them hand-cranked stand-mixers. One solves the need for intensive manual labor and the other doesn't, but introduces a new point of failure.

And even importing enzyme-containing detergent is unnecessary. Plant ash (a source of alkali) and aged urine (a source of ammonia) are all you need to create what's known as bucking lye which cleans just as effectively and uses byproducts that they themselves produce by default. Residual stains are removed via UV from sun drying.

There's absolutely no need to complicate this.

[nchmy]

This is the sort of comment I was hoping to find. I have focused in this area - improving lives of the poorest as efficiently as possible - for a long time and my immediate thoughts about this washing machine was that it was overcomplicated and definitely far too expensive (for many reasons) to ever really make a difference. Though, that won't stop these folks from doing this and receiving donations for it into perpetuity.

So much is possible if you just look at how nature, in one way or another, can do the work for you. No knead bread (or, better, periodic stretch and folds over the course of a few hours) is a perfect example. Or making a composting toilet/latrine by just adding sawdust, ash etc. Or simple and cheap rocket stoves that burn the smoke. Or cover crops and cultivating soil structure and microbes. Etc

The key for what you shared (and, i suppose this machine) is how little agitation you actually need, and how there's plenty of ways to do it with no fancy equipment. Can you share more about your experience, or even share some links, about the amount of agitation needed, how "cleaning" actually works (you said time and chemistry - but how?), and how to make effective, low-cost detergents anywhere?

Thanks!

[ffuxlpff]

This is so interesting! I'm the only one using the grandparents' old posser at our summer cottage (boomers love hi-tech and electric appliances) and even after I made lots of experiments didn't realize the importance of time. Now when I think about it it seems obvious.

[nataliste]

Your heart is in a better place than the NGO-contraption market, but what you also need to understand is that when you change a local optima in minimal ways, you also disrupt the rest of the local economy inadvertently.

Take the rocket stove as an example. It's an "improvement" over three stone and hearth fires, right? Less particulate in the air, less smoke, less ash, and more efficient use of fuel, all good things, right? Everyone has to work less to gather fuel, everyone's lungs are happier, and so on.

But not quite.

The rocket stove reduces ash yield, reducing one universally useful by-product. The rocket stove minimizes smoke production, so instead of creosote deposits on the walls acting as a general biocidal agent and lowering air humidity, there's now high humidity with exposed walls, an ideal climate for mold growth. Ever wonder why traditional pit-houses and earth-lodges rarely had issues with mold and damp and typically annually fumigated their entire homes with smoke? Or why women in some Northern and Eastern Europe peoples gave birth in saunas even prior to the advent of germ theory? The answer is smoke is useful, not only for creating relatively sterile environments, not only from molds, but also bugs.

Chronic smoke exposure imposes real respiratory costs, but traditional societies tolerated those costs because smoke simultaneously provided insect control, food preservation, fumigation, and moisture regulation. Interventions that remove smoke without deliberately replacing those functions often trade one health burden for several others. And the simplest way to achieve all of those functions is the same way humans have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years.

The rocket stove minimizes fuel use, so instead of heating and cooking, you just end up with cooking (and note that the rocket mass heater doesn't solve this problem, which is just banking heat rather than using it more efficiently). This separation "works" in hotter climates, but at that point, why are you cooking indoors to begin with? And again, the reduction in smoke makes insects (namely mosquitoes) much more likely to discern where breathing humans are and able to reach within biting distance.

Generally, traditional practices often encode systems-level knowledge that modern interventions ignore. Diffusion of traditional practices will generally be better than trying to invent a better mousetrap.

As far as cleaning goes, as in the saponification and misculation of fats, the gist is to treat a fat with an alkali with agitation and time. Heat speeds up the process (hot process), but enough time completes the reaction (cold process). Soap and detergents are just rapid versions of this process, but aren't at all necessary, so long as you have water and ash.

This understanding is called the sinner's circle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinner%27s_circle

It's the same reason when washing your hands you're "supposed to" sing happy birthday twice while agitating your hands. The soap is engaging in a chemical reaction with the fats on the your hands that takes more time because the human body can only tolerate so hot a temperature of water. You can use cold water and wait longer and have the same effect. The same thing is true of washing clothes, dishes, or whole bodies.

The Romans understood this. The baths were alkaline. They rubbed themselves with olive oil, used a stirgil (something like a frosting knife) to squeegee off the oil, then went in the pool. The alkali in the warm water combined with the residual olive oil and basically creates soap on your skin that is then rubbed off.

It's the same reason that Romans were able to have lily-white togas despite not having modern enzymatic cleaners and chlorine-based bleaches. They had lant and wood-ash alkali:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lant

In short, my experience is that I've improved my own life by observing what the time-rich resource-poor peoples of the world do rather than the inverse.