Re: shared laundry facilities
From: Ian Higginbottom (Ian.Higginbottomml.csiro.au)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 94 18:45 CDT
Cascade Cohousing (15 households when complete) currently has 8 households 
living on site.   Four of those use common laundry facilities but the remainder 
have
their own.  I imagine when everyone is on site that maybe eight households will
have wasing machines in their own houses and maybe no one will have their own 
dryer.  When we designed we thought everone would use the common laundry but
it turns out that shear convenience and old habits are hard to beat.  We 
currently have one front loading washer and an electric dryer and we will
have space for another machine and dryer if they are needed.  The washing 
machine is a good quality domestic unit and has given no trouble over eighteen 
months
of moderate use.
We use a 'tick-the-book' system for charging, one tick for a cold water wash 
and one tick for each half hour of drying time.  We set the charge on some 
thing of
a user pays basis where we guessed the number of washes that the machine would 
do over its life and came up with a per wash charge to cover thye replacement 
cost of the machine which is added to the estimated energy cost.  It works out 
at
about 25c per cold wash and 30c for half an hour of hot drying.  The machines
were purchased out of our common house budget.  Some ones adds up the ticks and
collects the money every quarter.  This system has worked well todate with the
laundry and we may extend it to other areas where individuals make extensive 
use of a commonly owned item.  For example heating the guest/quiet rooms in 
winter may be charged this way.

Ian Higginbottom

Results generated by Tiger Technologies Web hosting using MHonArc.