My first post on doing laundry explained what we did while traveling. Once we went from traveling to stationary, we made our laundry setup a bit more sophisticated. We added a dryer so we didn’t have to try to dry laundry in the winter rain and an ozone generator to get the laundry cleaner and use cold water only. We added a whole-trailer water filter and outlets to winterize the hoses. It took some doing to figure all of this out, so this post gives the details of our setup for anyone interested.
Everything is contained in this shed, which you can get from Home Depot or Lowes. The shed sits on a foundation of pressure treated 2x4s and pressure-treated plywood as recommended in the shed’s install guide.
We have this battery operated motion sensor light mounted on top of the door, facing into the trailer, so we have lighting when we realize just before bedtime that our pajamas are still in the dryer.
My husband built a shelf inside the shed from plywood and hard foam. The hard foam is to keep the section underneath a bit warmer, to winterize the water filter and softener. The heat that the freezer gives off also helps winterize this area.
We have a 30 amp trailer plugged into a 50 amp power pole. My husband used this adapter to create two 30 amp hookups. The laundry shed is plugged into one side and the trailer is plugged into another. This makes it possible to run the dryer at the same time as other things in the trailer.
We used this extension cord to plug the laundry shed into the pigtail connector. The cord connects to this power inlet, which is connected by Romex to a small electrical panel that contains 4x 15 amp fuses. Each of those connects to a GFCI outlet with Romex. All of these are wired inside the shed. The dryer connects to one outlet, the washer connects to another, our Engel freezer connects to another, and the laundry ozone generator connects to the last one. Our heated hoses are also connected to these outlets. We tried to buy heated hoses but they leaked, so we ended up making our own with heat tape, hose heaters, and drinking water hoses from Lowes.
We are on well water that doesn’t have toxins, but is full of rust. We have a water softener and filter system to clean the water. The water softener is this one for RV use. Every once in a while we clean it out with regular table salt.
We have a whole-trailer Pentek water filter. The base is this 3 stage filter housing. Pentek has lots of different filters you can use, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. When we lived in the city, we used their Chloramine filter cartridge. For our iron-heavy well water, we use an iron reduction filter, a sediment filter, and a carbon filter. The Camco RV filters lasted about a week with our water. The Pentek filters produce clear water for months. We also have a Berkey inside the trailer to filter our drinking water.
For laundry, we have this Giantex washing machine and this Panda dryer. Both work well and neither seems to have gotten moldy. I think it makes all the difference that the washer is a top loader that sits open in a drafty outdoor shed. We had a different Panda washing machine before and it also worked well, but the Clam tent it was in developed a leak while there were a bunch of paper craft supplies in there, and we ended up throwing everything out due to mold, including the washer. But it didn’t go moldy on its own. The only problem with the washing machine is that for whatever reason I often forget to close it, and it doesn’t run. (Hence my husband’s “Please close me!” sticky note.) We also have a laundry ozone generator that plugs into the washer to get our laundry cleaner.
The dryer runs on 110 volt. We installed the dryer vent through the shed wall. Not pictured here is that we have a lot of laundry cord strung from nearby trees as well as wooden clothespins and a clothespin bag so we can hang clothes to dry in nice weather. Our wooden clothespins did go moldy over the winter but they’re cheap enough to toss and replace.
We also use the shed to store various small tools and the carpet cleaner we bought to clean the Casita wall carpeting.
Hope that is helpful to someone! Feel free to post any questions you might have because someone else probably has the same one.
