Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Yup. True home automation is something that changes your life, not gadgets for rich people. I will call true home automation for example when I can throw the trash into a hatch at my same floor in a bag with RFID tag so that it will send it down and sort out it for recycle. I recall when I was less than 10 (mid '70s) my grandparents having those hatches (minus electronics of course) in their building. They would leave the bag there and it would drop to a container in the basement that the litter van would retrieve later. Of course it was long before recycling legislation so with new laws it had to be ditched and people would have again to bring their trash bags to the bins, which weren't that close. So why the system can't be repurposed, and introduced where necessary, to be recycle friendly? That's what I would call modern home automation, not stuff like reading a sensor and opening a window, which could have been done 10 years ago with an Arduino, 20 years ago with any uC and X10 already did in the '70s.

For some reason this reminds me. My old house, built in the 40s, had a mysterious small hatch in the closet floor across from the bathroom.

One day I opened it and it was just a cutout of the floor, directly over the washing machine in the basement below. I'm not sure if that's lazy or genius, but it doesn't get much easier than that I guess.

Our built-in-the-late-90s house has one of those in the hall closet upstairs. No door on it, just a hole. There’s some flashing and a “chute” that’s just a piece of sheet metal angled at 45 degrees to keep stuff from free-falling the whole way down, so it doesn’t look unfinished, but it’s basically just a hole.

Really it’s just a laundry chute. If the laundry room is directly under you, why make it fancier than that?

You'd want a door of some sort to keep things (cats, children) from falling down it, no?

It's like an 8-inch-square hole. Big enough for a shirt or pants or a towel to slide down, maybe with a nudge from a foot. By the time a kid can open the closet door to get to the hole, they'd have a hard time fitting through it. Any cat that falls through a hole in the floor has only itself to blame, and can likely manage the problem just fine.

We have kids and a cat and none have had trouble with it. It's not half as dangerous as and has a lower attractive-nuisance factor than any set of stairs.

8" square is pretty big: 11" on the diagonal. I think my 6yo would fit through that fine, though she has the sense not to.

Yeah I thought we might end up having to temporarily stick some ply across it or something when we moved in, but it's never been an issue. Our kids are psycho daredevils who don't listen for shit, so I have to assume it's just not that interesting to them. I think the diagonal sheet metal in the hole helps. Effectively, the hole in the ceiling under it is offset by the width of the hole itself, and the metal directs stuff between the hole in the floor and the hole in the ceiling under it, which means that you can't really get a good look at stuff falling down. You can see it go through the hole if you look in at an angle, but not the fall to the floor. The metal itself would be rad as hell to slide hot-wheels down, except it's pretty short and you can't see the car fall on the other side very well so I guess it's more fun to just throw them off the stairs, or the deck, or whatever. Its residing in a small, boring linen closet probably helps.

Growing up, my house had a laundry chute. In retrospect, it was probably installed by my dad. It was in the en-suite bathroom of the master bedroom, and had a door in the cabinet of the bathroom that folded down like a dishwasher door. It opened up directly on top of the washing machine in the basement.

I remember crawling up and down it all the time as a kid while playing hide and seek or whatever. In fact it had a flaw of a weak latch. Sometimes when you closed the bathroom door, The laundry chute door would fall open, blocking the bathroom door from opening. When this happened the only way to resolve it is to send a small child up through the laundry chute to close its door.

In typical Russian apartment washing machine is installed in bathroom.

And drying racks in sunroom.

I think this is common in Europe, too. Except in the UK and Ireland, where electrical regulations don’t allow it, banishing the washing machine to the kitchen.

> where electrical regulations don’t allow it, banishing the washing machine to the kitchen.

That explains! I've wondered why people in movies/series would keep washing machines in the kitchen.

Around here in medium size houses like mine the washing machine is typically placed in the same room as one of the toilets and the room is referred to as the washing room (vaskerom).

That would actually be allowed AFAIK - it's the bath/shower that makes it a bathroom (both in British English usage and electrical regs!) and banishes the white goods. But WCs tend to be v. small (as if given a little extra space architects say What shall we do, Fred, cupboard or loo?) so can't house them either.

Usually (flats/small houses aside) they'll be in the scullery (adjoining the kitchen) though, not actually in the 'cooking area'.

I’d say in the vast majority of house they’re in the kitchen; most don’t have a scullery/utility room.

Which is something I always hated in British houses, because nowadays it's quite common to have an open plan kitchen connected with the living room....which in a normal European house would be fine, but in a British house it means that every time you run a washing machine it's a source of noise for whatever you're doing in the living room. Enjoy watching a movie over a 1400rpm spin cycle, good luck!

The only good solution which works is moving it to the garage, but it's not possible in every house unfortunately.

Seems a nice way to send a basket with dirty clothes down without having to bag them or bring them through common areas. Was the basement in common with other people or it was all yours? Nice idea though, although hard to survive in modern times where the mere thought that a child could open it and fall down the basement onto the washing machine would deem it instantly.

This was a single family home, 3 bed 1 bath. Incidentally, the basement was smaller than the house itself, which I guess why the hatch wasn't in the bathroom itself(which was over empty crawlspace).

I'd never considered the child aspect, but that may explain why it had a lock on it(the turn up, push/pull, turn down kind, like on public restroom doors, unsure what they're called). Also, why it was so heavy. I wish I'd taken pics of it. From memory, it was probably 8"x8", about 2" thick. A small child could fit in it, but would probably have difficulty opening it.

For what it's worth my grandfather has a laundry shoot in his home, but his is in the wall and is small enough that a child would have difficulty fitting through if they should reach.

Fire and safety codes may mandate much of this.

it was just a cutout of the floor, directly over the washing machine in the basement below.

See also: the film Home Alone.

I thought laundry chutes were pretty common, they were in all three houses I grew up in in the US. (Second floor direct to basement in two, 1st and 2nd to basement in another.) One was built in the 30s and the others in the 70s.

If you want to something really "genius" look up razor blade wall banks.

We lived in a house with one of these as I was growing up. It was a chute in the corner of a little room next to the bathroom (too small for a bedroom). That led down to a cabinet at the top of the basement stairs that held the dirty laundry until you washed it.

And to be fair, this house was built in 1918, and I think part of the purpose was to have their maids/servants wash them. Out of sight and all. This house also had doors sectioning off the kitchen and made sure the basement had its own entrance.

I used to work in a place that put me in contact with a lot of architects who worked on skyscrapers. I asked one why new apartment buildings don't have trash chutes as often as they used to.

He said a lot of developers don't want the expense that goes into building them. And a lot of owners don't want the maintenance expense. They get clogged up more often than most people realize.

That said, when I lived in Seattle last decade, my building was new and had a trash chute. It got clogged about once a month. You'd see the maintenance guys with big long poles trying to shove the stuff through.

The house I grew up in had a laundry chute, from the hallway outside the bedrooms to a bin in the room/clothset with the washer and dryer. It's kind of superfluous (how hard is carrying a bin of laundry down the stairs, really?) but also kind of nice/fun.

For kids, fairly hard. I grew up in a single story house and a laundry chute was one of the romantic ideals. So I gave my kids the childhood I was denied — our house has a trapdoor in the kids' bedroom that drops straight down to the laundry room. It is fun! And more useful to me than a smart faucet or whatever.

Interesting; garbage chutes are required for any building over 4 storeys around here (Singapore). Some older places have individual chute openings in each flat, but most newer ones use centralized pneumatic systems, e.g. https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/about-us/our-role/smart-an...

Singapore and Japan are two countries where I've seen things work that don't work anywhere else because the citizenry treats the commons so well (whether out of pure civic pride or fear of some consequences I don't have any idea).

> whether out of pure civic pride or fear of some consequences I don't have any idea

A little of column A and a little of column B. Collectivism is sort of self-reinforcing, but there are also legal mechanisms that keep people honest.

They were pretty standard for higher buildings in communist Poland, but they quite quickly got disabled in many of them. The reason was that, without good and reliable maintenance, they were too good of a source of food for bugs, which would then spread around the apartments.

> I recall when I was less than 10 (mid '70s) my grandparents having those hatches (minus electronics of course) in their building.

The problem with those little hatches is that they create a breeding ground for rats and cockroaches.

They also serve as a fantastic means for idiots to grind your building's trash disposal system to a halt - when said idiots toss oversized items into them. (Christmas trees were a popular failure mode in my apartment building. How people got them into the trash chutes was beyond me.)

It seems like avoiding a walk to dispose of garbage isn't all that far removed from "gadgets for rich people?"

I get your point. It all depends on age, weight and how far one has to walk. For elderly people not having to walk to trash their cats litter (mine is like 8+Kg) plus glass bottles, plastics etc, can be a life changer. I still however see some of these automations more like bullet points in hotel advertising rather than really useful things.

On a similar note, many of those seemingly pointless as-sold-on-TV gadgets for kitchens or cleaning are actually assistive devices for people with limited mobility, relabeled for general sale on the side.

The building my wife was living in in Chicago when we first met had this sort of garbage chute (it was a 1920s-era building). Sorting recycling is not an issue: Chicago found a low-tech way to deal with the sorting: blue plastic bags are reserved for recycling only.

That didn't work so well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_bag#United_States

I’ve not lived in the city for 18 years. I didn’t know they gave it up.

I suspect that if incentives were more aligned, the program could have succeeded. People in general don't want to pay more, but you can guide people to certain behaviors if they benefit from the behaviors. In South Korea, people have to pay for bags for general trash, and for food waste. Recycling requires no extra fees. This incentivizes people to reduce general trash by increasing recycling sorting, and to reduce food waste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com