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Comment by canada_dry | Hacker News Reader

> still do housekeeping every day

They don't change sheets or towels ("for the environment")... just inspect the room, then leave.

Most of them still have signs up that if you leave the towels in a particular place (like on the floor in the bathroom), they'll replace them.

Hell, a lot of hotels were doing that before the pandemic. I thought it was a really good thing. I certainly don't need my towels replaced every day; that's just pointless and wasteful.

They don't have the thing anymore that you can leave the towels on the floor if you want them changed?

No, that has been replaced with the thing where you leave the towels on the floor if you don't want to have usable towels the next morning.

I hate the new thing

Sorry I’m from the UK. Do you mean if you leave the sign for cleaning they don’t clean the room? Or if you leave no sign they don’t clean the room? Or they just never clean the room if you stay for more than one day?

Thanks for clarification

Wait, then how do you dry yourself off the next day? Is washing towels really too much effort for them? Why would I accept worse service in a hotel than in my own home?!

You wash your towels after every use?

Yes? Why does everyone here seem to think that’s bizarre.

Because it is bizarre. Most normal people hang their towel on a towel rack after using it, and it dries in time for the next time they take a shower.

Washing your towel after every use is incredibly wasteful, and unnecessary. If the towel is "dirty" after you've bathed and used it to dry yourself off, then you probably should do a better job cleaning yourself while bathing.

Only true if you’re washing solely your towel. If you wash your clothes regardless, you might as well throw in the towel too. Why’d I choose to use a used towel when it can be washed.

What I suspect is that people here have massive washer/dryer combos that slurp oodles of energy, and use them only infrequently?

We can only fit one day of the clothes for the entire family in a single wash, therefore washing happens every day.

That actually makes a lot of sense. Big family + small washer = daily washes. Sounds nice, actually.

But on the other hand: If you didn't have to wash everyone's towels every night, would you still have to do laundry daily?

Bigger washer/dryers are not necessarily more wasteful, for what it's worth... it really depends on their efficiency (both for water and dryer heat). Sometimes doing it in bulk all at once can save water/energy per item even if it uses more overall. And newer machines tend to be a lot more efficient than older ones, especially if they are load-sensing front-loaders. Anyway, that's not really the point.

It's just interesting that your laundry patterns are different than anyone I've ever known. Thanks for explaining, that's all :)

Since you wash your towels so excessively, I am going to assume you likely do the same with your clothes. If you cut down on the amount of stuff you "have to" put in your washer, you might be able to fit several days worth of clothes that actually need to be washed in the washer.

Sure, if you want to re-wear those sweat soaked shirts and pants you wore while it was 33 degrees celsius outside, be my guest. I’ll take clean ones.

Sure we could wash less if we really wanted to, but it just doesn’t signify. The washer uses like 40L of water over 30m of runtime and then it’s done. We hang the clothes (and towels) outside, and by evening everything is fresh.

The shower runs at about 10L a minute. I think you can see how the washing quickly becomes irrelevant, and the shower needs to be heated too, unlike the washer.

Regular people don't change towels every day. That's probably reserved for people with a phobia, the real solution there is to seek help though.

What do you mean? If you hang them on the towel rack, they dry (mostly) and can be reused. They do get gross after a while (a week or two) but not daily.

Do you really wash your towels after each use? Why? How?

> How?

Presumably the same as everyone else, by putting them in the washer.

Are there people who do laundry daily? Most people I know do it every week or two.

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