I had zero appreciation for the labor-savings of a washing machine until now. I should have, because growing up we used a combination of washer, wringer/mangler, clothesline, and dryer to clean the clothes of seven people. It was hard but I was young and all work was hard. Laundry takes labor at any age, it turns out.
The EcoWash is actually fairly simple; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND7_9aQ5HdM. It was about $60 on Amazon and it's paid for itself a hundred times over. It does take time; one load, from wash fill, crank, drain, rinse fill, crank, drain, hang, takes about thirty minutes. The loads are small so I do around three/week. It takes 24-36 hours for the clothes to dry on a folding rack standing in my bathtub with a fan blowing on them. I estimate the clothes are about 60% as clean as they would be in a conventional machine and there tends to be some annoying soap residue on dark clothing. I use Dropps mini detergent pacs (dissolvable organic pods).
While I enjoy the moral superiority of environmentally-friendly laundry, if my landlord said he was installing a washer/dryer I wouldn't argue. I have tremendous respect for people who did laundry by hand for most of the history of clothed humanity.
