A Load-ed Question: Our German Washing Machine

Last week, I showed you our awkward, WHITE bathroom.  It didn’t have any storage, and I mentioned our confusion.  A washing machine (and maybe dryer?) had to be wedged into the space, which meant major knee banging unless we came up with a solution.  We shout a big thank you to those who left comments, and now it’s time to share what we found:

The “before” shot with previous tenants’ things

For those of you who don’t know, just about everything in Europe costs more (sigh).  Gas costs over $9 a gallon.  We have a 19% sales tax incorporated into the price of everything in Germany.  And power in Germany costs about three times as much as it does in the US.  So you can probably guess–we learn how to live a little more efficiently here.

We have decided to forgo the dryer.

First there’s no place to put a dryer in our apartment–even a stackable washer/dryer would make our bathroom impossible.  And second, well those energy bills.  Dryers use more energy than any other product in the home.  Our towels are a little crunchier.  We have to iron a little more often.  But we’re doing it the European way, and most Europeans use drying racks like this one we picked up.


Too stylish for words?  Hmm.

We decided on a mini washer.

The washing machine we picked out seems perfect.

  • The drum is half-size.  The surprising thing is that we’re not doing laundry more often.  Instead, we’ve quit running half-loads in enormous machines like we used to.
  • The washer is a “front-loader”.  Okay you can obviously see that we load laundry at the top, but the drum is positioned sideways like a front-loader, which is better at cleaning clothes and using less water and energy (more info on that below).  We have to unsnap the drum to put clothes in.

    • No knee-banging with the toilet on the left!

    Why would you want a front loader?  They cost more.

    They also:

  • use less water (which we pay for by the cubic meter in Germany)
  • use less energy because less water has to be heated
  • use less energy because they have a higher capacity.  Yeah for fewer loads!
  • remove more water because the drum can spin faster, which is great for saving energy in the dryer or shortening the time you have to deal with laundry drying in the hallway

    • We’re so in love with our new washing machine.  Is that horrible to say?  I was dreading the thought of loading my bike and heading to the laundromat, and there was only so long we could last with clean clothes we brought from the US.  Now we can’t wait to share our storage plans with you a little later.

    (Imagess by Making This Home and rack by aavaas.)