Wash clothes without power

Why this stops being a chore

In an ordinary week, laundry is housework. In a prolonged emergency it becomes disease control, and the lice and scabies page explains why: body lice live in clothing rather than on the body, they appear precisely where people are cold, crowded and unable to change clothes, and they carry typhus, trench fever and relapsing fever.

That is not a historical curiosity. It reappears wherever those conditions occur, and a household in an unheated house wearing the same layers for weeks is exactly those conditions.

So keeping a way to wash clothes hot is a health measure, and it belongs alongside the water and sanitation pages rather than filed under domestic chores.

What actually cleans clothes

Four factors, and understanding the trade between them is what makes this manageable when everything is scarce.

Time is the free one and the one people neglect. A long cold soak does a large share of the work for nothing. Soak overnight and the scrubbing needed the next morning drops dramatically.

Temperature is the expensive one, so it gets reserved for the loads that actually need it, which is the section below.

The kit

• Two large containers. One to wash, one to rinse. Tubs, buckets, a bath, a dustbin.
• A plunger-style agitator. A clean toilet plunger works, and a purpose-made laundry plunger with a cone and holes works far better. This is the single best cheap item for this job.
• A washboard, or any ribbed surface, for collars and cuffs.
• A mangle or wringer if you can find one. Otherwise a stout stick to twist against.
• A large pot for boiling, kept for laundry.
• Line and pegs, and an indoor airer.

A plunger and two buckets is a genuinely workable system for a household, and costs almost nothing. A bucket with a tight lid also works as a tumbling washer: fill, seal, and roll or agitate it.

The method

1. Sort. Heavily soiled from lightly soiled, and anything needing heat separately. Do not wash a nappy load with shirts.
2. Shake out dry dirt outdoors first. A surprising amount of soil is dry and comes out with shaking and brushing, and it never has to be washed out.
3. Pre-treat stains while dry or damp: soap rubbed in, or a soak.
4. Soak. Cold or warm, ideally overnight. This is the free labour saver.
5. Agitate. Plunge vigorously for a few minutes, rest, plunge again. Rest periods let the chemistry work and are not wasted time.
6. Scrub collars, cuffs and heavy soiling on a board.
7. Wring out.
8. Rinse. Twice if you can, in clean water. Under-rinsing is the commonest cause of skin irritation and stiff, grey laundry, and it matters more when soap is scarce because residue accumulates.
9. Wring hard. The drier it comes off the wringer, the less it has to dry in the air, and in Britain drying is the bottleneck.
10. Dry.

Reuse the water in sequence: cleanest items first, dirtiest last, in the same water. Then the final water goes to flushing or to the garden, per greywater reuse.

Which loads need heat

This is where the fuel goes, and it is worth being deliberate.

Boiling for 10 to 15 minutes comfortably exceeds every disinfection threshold in domestic guidance, and it is how this was done for centuries. It is completely effective and it costs fuel.

The fuel-saving version: bring the water and laundry to the boil, then transfer the whole pot into a haybox. The insulation holds it above the 50°C threshold for hours on the heat you already put in. That turns the most fuel-expensive laundry job into one of the cheapest, and it is the single best trick on this page.

Drying, which is the real problem in Britain

Washing is the easy half. Drying, in a damp cold country with no tumble dryer, is where it actually fails.

Damp clothing is not neutral. It chills the wearer, which matters enormously on the hypothermia page, and damp fabric stored or worn grows mould and smells.

• Wring as hard as you physically can. Every drop removed mechanically is a drop that does not have to evaporate. A mangle is worth acquiring.
• Outdoors beats indoors, even in cold weather. Wind matters more than sun, and a cold windy day dries well.
• Frost drying works. Water sublimates from frozen fabric, and clothes hung out in a hard frost come in dry and stiff.
• Indoors, use airflow, not just heat. Above a stove, in a draught, near an open window. Still warm air saturates and then does nothing.
• Do not dry laundry in the room you sleep in. It dumps litres of water into the air of a room you then breathe in all night, which causes condensation, mould and damp, and makes the room harder to heat.
• Wash smaller loads more often, so there is always drying capacity. A single huge wash that cannot dry is worse than three small ones.
• Rotate. Two sets per person, one worn, one drying, is the minimum workable system.

Making the soap last

• Use far less than you think. Most people use several times more detergent than needed, and excess soap is harder to rinse out and leaves residue.
• Soap goes on the dirt, not in the water, for spot cleaning. Rubbing a bar directly onto a collar uses a fraction of what a full dose does.
• Soda crystals (washing soda) soften water and cut grease, are cheap, store indefinitely, and stretch soap a long way. Worth stocking in quantity.
• Bicarbonate of soda deodorises and helps lift stains.
• Vinegar in the rinse removes soap residue and softens fabric, and you can make it from windfalls indefinitely.
• Wood ash makes lye, and lye plus fat makes soap. That is the long-term answer and it lives in the making and mending domain.
• Sunlight bleaches and disinfects, free. Dry whites in the sun and stains fade.
• Wash less. Air and brush outer garments rather than washing them, wash what touches skin more often. This is how clothing was actually managed before machines and it is not a compromise.

Underwear and socks are the ones that must be washed often, because they touch skin, get damp, and are where skin problems and infestations begin. Outer layers can go a long time between washes with airing.