We have a rather unique way of doing laundry in our house. We have a single unit that is a washer and a dryer in the same unit, no it is not a standard item in stores so we had to special order it. One of the great things about the washer dryer we got is that it also has a delay timer on it so we can set it to do our laundry while we sleep which then allows us to conveniently use off-peak electricity to do our laundry. Of course to further increase our savings I hang some of our things to air dry on racks in the house and in the summer I love to hang the clothes outside to dry.
One of the odd things with our washer is that if I am going to use the dryer to dry my clothes I can only put in a half load of laundry (luckily half of a huge load is still a very large load) and set my washing machine to do a wash and dry. Of course since we have both the washer and dryer in one unit it takes a while for the clothes to dry because it runs on 110-volts of electricity, but since we run it while we are asleep anyhow it really doesn't matter to us that it takes longer. Our washer is also very water and energy efficient so we qualified for rebates from our water and electric companies when we purchased it. The rebates helped to make the washer a little more affordable. I also love how clean our clothes get in our new washer. I only use about half of a portion of detergent (I then split that between the regular wash cycle and prewash cycle) about half a portion of softener and some OxyClean. That gets almost all of my very rambunctious two and a half year old's stains out of his clothes, no pre treating or stain sticks or anything.
