Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: laundry machines - lease or own?

[Carol Singleton (quetzal4]

At Oak Creek Commons in Paso Robles, CA, we own our common laundry machines.
All of our units have a place for stackable machines and our laundry room
has 3 high energy efficient washers and 3 dryers.  About 15 of the 36
households use the common laundry facilities and the rest use their home
machines. Common House &  Kitchen laundry is done in the community machines.
For larger items folks who have their own machines sometimes use the
community ones.  We bought our machines almost 9 years ago and got a 5 year
warranty which was well used - anytime anything goes wrong, they come and
fix the machines.  We renewed our warranty for another 5 years after the
first one expired.  

 

We have an informal tally system for people to mark their wash and dry loads
and at the end of every month, I tally up the loads and send a bill to each
person who has used the machine.  We each pay 50 cents for each wash and the
same for each dry. About half the folks - usually ones who have very small
monthly bills -  prepay and the rest just write a check for the total each
month.   The money goes to defray common house water and heat (although most
of us use cold water washes.)  It also goes to build reserves for when we do
need to replace the machines - probably after our second 5 year warranty
runs out.     Once a month, one of my other jobs is to clean the washing
machine seals as these can get quite gunky if folks use the incorrect amount
of detergent or sneak in non-high energy machine detergent.     

 

Our laundry room is pretty small so most folks do not fold their laundry in
it although there is a small counter for doing so.   No one lingers in that
room as it is just too small for more than 1 person at a time to be in
there.  If possible, I recommend you not place the laundry room next to the
guest rooms.  Ours are close to them.  Some of our folks like to do their
laundry very late at night and others very early in the morning and noise
from the machines can sometimes wake the guests.

 

Carol