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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Respect, but this is kinda the hard way - I just plugged mine (dumb machine, not smart) in via an energy metering plug, and when energy use drops to less than 10W for more than 2 minutes, it’s done - very simple homeassistant automation. Convenient for me as the machine is 500m from the house.

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Now I want to know why your washing machine is half a kilometer from your house.

Seriously, me too. I also want to know how they transport the laundry to/from the machine. I'm hoping for a conveyor belt of sorts.

The factory must grow!

Vacuum tube system like a bank drive through.

A well aimed wind-compensated tshirt cannon.

A backpack, currently, although one of my myriad projects is a rack railway for when I am old and feeble.

Them living on a farm is the only explanation I can come up with.

Correct. Have several houses on the land, and it made more sense to put the machine where it was both equidistant between them and where the washing line is.

No, the obvious over engineered solution would be to mount the machines on a train (or tracked vehicle for bonus points) that can come when called and go where needed!

The problem (scratch that, "the most interesting challenge") with that is that a washer needs a water supply line, water release outlet (if not for chemicals, might not be the issue on a farm) and electricity (perhaps a simple problem to get power connections to it through the rail like trains).

I’m envisioning docking stations - power is relatively easy with pantographs and similar things, water could be gravity fed into holding tanks …

Nah, you just put a 5-10kwh battery on there, along with a small water tank and pump - a load of washing (in Europe) only uses 50L and about 2kwh tops - up to 5 with drying. The rest of the battery powers the drive train for the vehicle. Then you just have a dock for charging and water replenishment. We only use zero phosphate eco detergent, so waste can be dumped wherever. Maybe position it to water some plants when it drains.

You know, my whole life is madcap projects (today is running half a km of fibre down the inside of a live water main) so I’ll update you when I have a mobile laundromat.

Sounds cheaper to just get multiple washing machines instead :D

One reason I can think of - in some places where houses are small (like in cities the UK) you might not have a garage on your property and might rent one nearby (they are often in little rows, e.g. [1]). So they might have that kind of situation and have the washing machine there if it's a very small house?

1. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-row-of-private-car-garages...

It's tough times: their villa has a washing room in the servants block away from the house, but now they had to release everyone but the valet, housekeeping, masseur and hairdresser, so the washer role has been eliminated and now they need the notification for their valet to go pick it up.

This is what I do - when the washer finishes, a light turns on in the kitchen letting us know. Then, when the dryer has drawn power for 10 seconds, the light turns back off, because that’s a good indication that someone dealt with the wet laundry. (Sometimes things get out of sync but not often!)

Couldn't you just set a timer for 45 minutes, or whatever? Is there that much variance in load times?

Some washing machines (mine at least) have some "smart" features that adjust the wash time depending on some factors. Nothing more annoying than coming to the laundry after my phone alarm goes off, and seeing the timer on my washing machine go UP(!!!) from 0:01 to 0:02 ...

Eliminating any unneeded manual steps adds reliability. The load done thing goes off when the load is done, you don't forget to start it.

Smart plugs are cheap enough where it doesn't take a lot of convenience to justify it.

That's also my approach and works great.

I used Shelly plugs for for the washer and the dryer. Put little Go application on my server in the basement and get Telegram notifications + HTTP interface updates about the different states (running, finished, standby).

This saved a lot of forgotten loads .

I do the same,works great. I liked it so much that im doing the same with my microwave, after removing the annoying beeper it had. Now i get a decent single short beep and can monitor how often I've used it.

Nex is a cybersecurity student in a house of similar people, they're gonna take every way :3

quote:

> The plan is, in future, since we can't hack something that doesn't have a brain, to instead attach a brain to it. The dishwasher is easy, we can just whack that on a smart plug and monitor when the power use surges and drops. The dryer is a bit more difficult, since they pull a LOT of power, and smart plugs typically either don't support that much power, or are incredibly expensive. So that's likely going to be some fancy vibration sensor-based thingy

Vibration sensor is exactly what I did, for exactly that reason. Zigbee sensor + home assistant and a little bit of timer logic to manage the state

Shelly has power meters with clamps, so that the meter is not in-line. There are probably Zigbee variants out there.

Yeah this is my approach too. Though I need to revisit the thresholding.

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