Seems like a decent alternative to doing hand-washables in the sink or tub, or the occasional regular wash.

Hmm I grew up without a washer and dryer and we washed our clothes by hand so to me this is quite doable. However, my washer/dryer is right across from my bedroom so I have no use for it, but sounds like a good solution for those who are not so lucky.

I rented a room in a tiny apartment in france a few summers ago. I'm 99% sure the little old french lady who owned the place had one of these, or something like it. she took the majority of her clothes to the dry cleaner/laundry service down the street, but washed her "unmentionables" in this. :)

Dumbest waste of money ever for what is essentially a plastic tub with a crank.

As far as the PR:
Military folks have laundry rooms in their dorms - and they're free.
College students also have laundry rooms in their dorms.

I agree with bepsf. This is like a large salad spinner. You can get a small unit that plugs in and does all the agitation for you for about half the cost.

You can also clean your salad greens.

i thought this was a salad spinner..

From a cost perspective, it seems like a huge moneysaver since you don't have to keep feeding quarters or credits into the laundromat. However, from a practical standpoint, how much time do you really want to take to do laundy?

IMO, you can either hand wash at 25% the capacity, but wash every week OR you can wait two weeks and just haul everything to the laundromat. The only scenario in which this would be MORE beneficial than the laundromat is if you didn't have a car, couldn't walk to a laundromat, and couldn't haul two weeks' worth of clothing.

Then again, how much arm power does it take to churn your clothes clean? And how would you dry them if you already live in a very small space? Three laundry racks?

Really, all I'm thinking about is the potential for washing my 'unmentionables' in my salad spinner...

I actually like going to the laundromat. We can get five loads of laundry in three hours from the time I start dragging the clothes to the car to the time I'm done putting things back in the drawer. It's going to be a huge change when we buy a house with laundry and I can only do one load at a time.

This sounds like I'd be hanging wet laundry all over my apartment. I'm sure the cat would have a field day pulling it all down.

For me it would depend how long the whole deal takes.

huh, it is interesting... If it had a mini motor and plugged in, I would totally spend $100 bucks on it since it wouldn't break the "no washing machine" in my NY apartment rule. Otherwise I don't think it is worth it as it is just really handwashing without your hands.

At first I was a little depressed when I saw this, because I just bought a tiny Haier portable washer. But then I saw the price. I got my Haier for $85 on Craigslist, it does everything automatically, and it's not that much bigger.

I'm curious as to how well the spinning action spins water out of clothes.

hand crank/churning..empty..ugh...no...and no spin cycle? crazy...; O

"It's super manual — a wash cycle involves filling up a tub, adding soap, churning a crank, emptying, filling again with clean water, more churning, emptying again, and finally, hanging to dry. The capacity is approximately 25% of a standard washer."

For camping/RV'ing, that'd be fine. For every day, though, it seems like more of a pain than going to the laundromat.

Depending on how hot the water can get for this thing, I might consider getting it for crafting. I have a lot of fabric, and some of it's old or vintage.
I'm also experimenting with the felting process, and this would help with that - it's hard to boil wool on the stove, but I could boil water and pour it into this, and then not touch the wool while I crank.
Might even use it to wash my unmentionables or those pesky "dry clean only" items.

I used to have one of these, and it was pretty great. It was very easy to really agitate the clothing and spin water out of it. The cranking system of the Wunderwash seems much sturdier than a salad spinner...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Laundry-Alternative-Wonderwash-SpinDryer/dp/B002C8HR9A/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1299692391&sr=8-9

I've had my eye on the Wonderwash Portable Washer which gets good reviews online and is a very reasonable price. Any idea what the Laundry Pod will cost? I line dry my clothes anyway and it's just my husband and me, so it would be totally doable. I would have loved something like this when I was a carless college student taking my laundry to a laundromat. I have a frontload washer now which I really like but one downside is the length of the wash cycle. This looks like a time saver for small loads. I'm not afraid of the hand crank...it's just some needed exercise. ;)

At $1.75 to wash and $1.75 to dry, I can never do "half a load" even if I want to wear something the next day... This would be an excellent supplement to my coin-op situation, and would make washing delicates, first washes with a splash of vinegar, and the occasional "thing that's so dirty I can't put it in the washing machine until I've washed it" much more convenient.

Or you could just pound your clothes on rocks in a nearby river or stream. I like living in the modern world.

I would want to know if this would be any easier than just throwing your clothes in the tub with soap and water and stomping away and rinsing using the shower, this is what I have done when our washer broke, and I didn't feel like going to a laundry mat with my kid.

Looks like the perfect salad spinner for a giant catering event.

It might be using less water because it seems to be tiny, but then it would be washing less clothing... so less water doesn't really count for anything there. I mean, if that's the case.

"At $1.75 to wash..."

...it would take 229 uses just to break even on the purchase price of this thing - not counting any sales tax, shipping or bill increases from hot water usage.

This is marketing at its finest. A plastic laundry basket placed in the tub and agitated by hand would probably produce a very similar effect.
I wash all of our running clothes by hand using Penguin Sport Wash (the most miraculous product EVER). They tend to be very smelly and I don't want to commingle them with regular clothes. I have found the tub or kitchen sink to be more than adequate.

At a smaller price, I'd consider it, at least for things that are merely lightly soiled and do not need a thorough washing. $100? Too much.

The hardest part of hand wash is getting things dry in a reasonable time, and this option doesn't seem to help with that, unless I missed the part about spinning or wringing. I live in a house, and I don't have space for a whole load of laundty to drip dry, so I'd assume apartment dwellers would also have that problem. Not a product I'd be happy with -- rather pay coin op fees, if I had to.

gonna say no. with a washer/dryer in my apt building for $1.25 a load Im able to throw the stuff in the washer/dryer, get back to my studio and continue cleaning, cooking what have you while the wash is on. The time pro, wins over the cost here.

i'd consider this alternative if it's only $50.

Hmmm, not likely to have a use for it. Living in less than 300 sq ft, I would have no place to store this, let alone set it up to use it. I will stick with schlepping my laundry down to the basement via elevator. $1.50 wash and $1.50 dry, not a bad deal.

I'd buy it for $50 CA, not for $100.

I have a really LOW tech laundry basket solution.

I like to presort from the beginning. I want the kitchen towels in one basket, the bath towels in another, the sheets in another, the clothes in another, and so on and so forth.

I don't have room for that many baskets, plus baskets aren't that easy to move around, especially if you have to travel to the laundromat, or in my case, down the hall.

So I use sturdy paper bags with handles, the type used for food delivery. Several can be jammed into a small amount of space, and easily pulled out when full. I use sandwich bags for pre-measured detergent, and I'm ready to go.

This sounds like a ton of work. In the same amount time it would take to do 8 mini loads you could do 2 at the laundromat. And they'd be dry when you're done. I suppose if you're desperate it'd do, but I can't imagine being that desperate.

As someone who lives in a 3rd floor walkup with laundry in the basement I would totally use this for three reasons. #1 my building doesn't allow W/D in apartments #2 It costs 2.10 to wash per load and then .30 cents for every 5 mins to dry. #3 when I hand wash it's impossible to get the clothes anywhere near wrung out enough to dry efficiently. Is 100 dollars a bit pricey? Yeah, but if it works it could cut back on my trips to the basement. Making it necessary to go down there only for towels and my husbands scrubs.

There's one born every minute.....

NO!
This is better:
http://www.lehmans.com/store/Home_Goods___Laundry___Washing___Pressure_Handwasher___23305?Args=

Less work, WAY less water used. Yeah you gotta spin it for like 2 minutes but it gets them clean and its enclosed and uses pressure to clean not just agitating clothing...
I would wash my gym clothes in it when I just couldn't make the trip to the laundromat.
It is also $40.

It's a salad spinner. No, I wouldn't spend money on a salad spinner for clothes. It does nothing I can't do in the sink by myself, and faster.

Hmm. Perhaps I WILL use the salad spinner.

If it can spin out water I could see this as a good supplement to regular laundry for hand-wash items and delicates. I wash sweaters and dresses in a tub, by hand, and it's always a pain to get them to dry without wringing them out (which stretched and wrinkles).

If it doesn't let you spin the water out though, it looks pretty pointless to me.

We're not allowed to install any sort of washer in our apartment, and it WOULD be nice to have this for for those odd small loads or things that need to be washed right away.

I agree this would work for longer camping trips however unless you are car-camping or RVing you're not going to want to lug this thing around with you. I think better to opt for carrying a salad spinner and use that to wash your spinach and your socks. Or not.

this looks to be worse than the wonderwash (which i freecycled away last year).

these crank things eat up a lot of time. not worth it imo. i ended up getting a danby portable on cl and it totally changed my life-- wish i'd done it years ago.

I would have *loved* something like this when I lived in apartments. It's the spinout that really makes it useful.

Yeah, when the laundry machines at your apartment building work they're pretty cheap. But by and large they're also disgusting.
Especially my last apartment before moving into my home. Also true for many laundromats.

What a COMPLETE waste of money. I do wash some things by hand (lingerie and some delicate blouses) and I would never in a million years consider this an option.

Like others have said, it's just a large salad spinner. A large, unbelievably overpriced salad spinner.

I hate doing laundry in the sink (I don't have a tub) because the water always end up going everywhere and I end up with no skin left on my knuckles from scrubbing the clothes so this sounds like a pretty good solution to me. I have 360 sq ft of available living space and I see no problem storing the bucket sized pod. My building's laundry room operates with a debit card solution and I frequently run out of credits and this would let me wear my favourite dress the next day because the spin cycle seems to be able to remove enough water from the garments to let them dry overnight and I'm all for that!

Yeah, looks dumber than a wonderwash. And a wonderwash is $50. I am buying a portable washer-dryer combo off CL this weekend, but if I weren't I would go for a wonderwash over this. You aren't shoving a full-size blanket in either one, anyway.

sheets? how?

So...umm...basically, it's a giant salad spinner. Right?

Huh. Interesting concept, but I'd probably be annoyed rather quickly.

I've been pretty happy with my little LG combo washer, and it paid for itself in 6-9 months (compared to coin laundry). Takes forever to dry compared to a regular dryer, but it's faster than air drying.

I like it cause you could make, like, a giant salad with this. Awesome! For my laundry I'll just go to the laundromat.

pretty much agreeing with folks about it being a glorified salad spinner. another large piece of plastic for a little too much. just more stuff.

i am certainly not apposed to manual washing, but it seems like the circumstances for this item to be worth it would be too narrow. even back in college when i had to lug loads blocks away to the lander-mat, up hills and an up many stories. time and energy was at a premium, and it would have been more worth my time to do laundry once or twice a month, in one or two big loads for a few dollars... than sporadically by hand once or twice a week.

Leahman's has several manual washers that are nicer than this. They have groovy retro ones that are furniture, and they have this compact one I have been eyeing for hand washing: http://www.lehmans.com/store/Natural_Goods___Cleaning_and_Laundry___Pressure_Handwasher___23305?Args=

I don't think it would save that much money. It is mostly about doing things with your hands, and being independent. It is nice do something simple - "chop wood, carry water", and to have alternatives.

Good timing for this thing, because I was just washing things in my sink last night cursing the laundromat for closing at 9pm. Now I'm completely out of socks and nearly out of underwear and have no time for the laundromat. This is New York City--I don't have time for things that aren't 24 hours (kidding)... But seriously, for those times when I haven't been able to make it to the laundromat or realize I need my yoga mat towel the next day and it's already midnight, yeah this would be totally perfect. Especially since I HATE going to the laundromat unless I absolutely have to (hence, the running out of socks).

Hmm, I am *so* using my salad spinner. I never use it for food, so I can spare it for this.

Giant salad spinner.

I agree, it does look like a giant salad spinner. However, it is a great improvement over the "Sputnik" hand crank washer I used to use. As we get greener and greener, this notion will evolve to where it should be. Currently, I wash everything by hand, with the exception of sheets and bathtowels, which I drag to the laundromat at the 59th minute. I have a centrifugal extractor purchased from Laundry Alternatives, which spins the clothing to an incredibly dry state. I hang on hangers and if I want, I can wear in an hour. Sweaters take a tad longer.

Aside from the multiple issues others here have raised regarding the practicality of washing clothes in this thing, am I the only one who sees a problem with drying them? Where would you drape all the wet clothes to dry? I live in a studio -- even if I had room for multiple drying racks, I certainly
would not want to have to look at wet laundry for the hours and hours it would take it to dry.

No thanks.

I have a husband and a baby AND we cloth diaper. I'm not spending triple the time to put poopy diapers in a salad spinner and then finding space for a drying rack. That my son will just pull all of the clothes off of anyway. Seems great for camping, though I thought part of the fun was ~roughing~ it.

I once lived in a tiny no-washer/dryer apartment that was so many blocks away from the nearest laundromat that I did end up washing clothes by hand, so I'm open to the idea... But certainly not for $100 worth.

People living in such circumstances don't often have $100 to play with, and as pointed out, it might take a long time to make back that investment.

Now, if someone could figure out how to make a collapsible, easy to store version, I can see it being loved by the low-impact small-living crowd.

Looks like a salad spinnner to me. I could use my salad spinner, which I got at Stuffmart (WMart) for about 10.00. Not a bad idea for bras and pantyhose but def. not worth 100.00! Good idea for any type of emergency or low-impact living.

I owned the "wonder wash" the one that has a spout to drain the water, the crank broke after a month...I recently bought "The Laundry Pod" from HSN,and so far it is wonderful! I still use the regular laundry room at my apartment complex,but I use it much less.I wash a few small loads in the laundry pod,so I go to the laundry room, once a month instead of up to three times.Also in the winter I won't have to lug clothes or wheel them in a cart in the snow.

I have a industrial size garment rack,that I hang the wet clothes on....The garment rack holds 500 lbs.My wet laundry looks neet hanging on clothes hangers,I hang small items on small laundry drying racks...i got a nice little system going...When I do laundry @ the laundry room ,I never dry anything,to save money, plus the dryer destroys clothes...

Well, washboards and laundry plungers ARE still made. Do a search on amazon for washboards. You will see all kinds of hand washing items show up. My fav is the Japanese washing bowl. It's a bowl with a washboard built in.

This would be great for the environment and your energy bill. As for drying inside - you can buy an indoor clothesline for around $10 . It hooks up to your wall and retracts.

Seattle Laundry Care

Actually, drying hand washing is very easy. Use a heated towel rack. All you do is turn it on, put a towel on the rack, put the clothes on top of the rack (I've done up to 10 deep with no problem), put a towel on top and go away for a couple hours.

Btw, the reason this looks like a large salad spinner is because the developers found out that many women were washing their delicates in salad spinners and decided to make a larger version with drainage. This actually works great in a pinch. At 57, I'm no college student but I have had no problem using it, but pre-soaking is a must.