Laundry Day ?

[Alan Wheeler]

eeerrrrhhhhhg, Kirk you just put me off......lots of things actually.

[c.spots]

Originally Posted by Harriet

I read somewhere that you could actually clean your clothes with ammonia and water, and it didn't leave an ammonia smell. I didn't believe this at first, but I tried it and it works. You need two gallons of water in a bucket with one cup of ammonia. Use a plunger or whatever (tying the bucket to the bow and letting it agitate as you go along works too). After a few minutes, wring out and hang. The clothes smell clean, and there is no ammonia smell.

I'm not sure if people reading this quickly will appreciate the advantages of ammonia for laundry to cruisers. The main ones are the tremendous savings in water, and the need to only wring out the laundry once.

The egg type spinner gadget has not been worth the effort. Go with a 5 gallon bucket; black if you want warm water.

[rustypirate]

I would also recomend getting a wringer. They make them for commercial car wash facilities to ring out the drying cloths.

This will get the clothes much drier than wringing by hand and it will cause less streching of the clothes too.

They are a little pricy, but worth it in my opinion.

http://www.topoftheline.com/towelwringer.html

[osirissail]

In one harbor I spent some considerable time in whenever it rained real good, everybody was out doing the "dinghy stomp." As your dinghy fills with fresh rainwater you throw your dirty clothes into the dinghy add detergent and stomp around for awhile. Gets your clothes, yourself and the dinghy clean. Then hang the clothes on the lifelines and the rain will "rain water fresh rinse" them. Lots of fun especially if some good music is playing and the rum is flowing.

[Cormorant]

We used the ammonia method (learned right here on CF!) on our recent trip to the Bahamas. It worked great.

We often used local well water (like at Shroud Cay) that we might not want to drink, but was fine for washing clothes. This really saved our finite drinking water supplies.

The ammonia method is great for getting body odor out of clothes. But it doesn't "get your whites their whitest," so after a few weeks or months, you might want to do a load with bleach instead. That ought to evaporate just as ammonia does.

Also, ammonia doesn't remove sun-screen stains, which all our shirts eventually got around the necklines. Those needed to be scrubbed out with Joy first, but that could be done in salt water.