Conquering the laundry.

Here's a shot of my little bathroom. The shower is cool, two sliding glass doors meet to make a corner of it, something I'd never seen before. I discovered its reallyeasy to clean and the black bits around the caulking you see here cleaned up with just a little scrubbing and hot water. Something else new is the way the toilet flushes - it has a little knob on top you pull up for flushing, no push down handle here. The sink here is definitely bigger than the kitchen sink too.

However the most unique thing in my bathroom is the washer/dryer. Now when i saw this place advertised on craigslist, I'll admit it caught my eye that it included a washer/dryer in it, not many little apartments do. I should have paid a tad bit more attention. Theres just one machine that does the work of both, and you can see it on the left there. Its a Malber WD 1000, and am I ever grateful the instruction booklet is here.

So on moving day, I'll confess there was some wet wash that came with me - a few things that just didn't make it through the dryer when we packed the last things out. As we're moving boxes, trying to assemble the bed (it was trickier than it looked) and we were starting to turn our attention to Lunch... we had this laundry to finish doing.

I recall handing the instructions over and several folks crowding around the Malber. A couple of folks gave it a try, we did manage to get it to spin and to wash the load again... but the dryer continued to elude us. We finally gave up shortly after lunch and went on with our day. Once it was all completed, We returned the U-Haul, did some last minute cleanup at the farmhouse and came back to the piles of boxes. It was then that Jp managed to determine how the Malber worked. We had to put the laundry through another wash cycle, but we did get it to switch over and then dry afterwards. (Success - Yeah!)

The following week I did some research online. I read and reread the instructions. There must be a way to just dry things - especially since it said it could wash 10 pounds of clothes, but the dryer worked better with just 5-7 pounds of clothes. That seemed to indicate to me it could do a "dry only cycle" even if I couldn't figure it out. I did discover an extra spin helped it dry more, and keeping the spin speed under 700 would reduce wrinkles. I fingured out orange was for more sturdy stuff, the blue was more gentle, and the gray was the for the delicates. I could wash only... I could lightly wash and dry... I could spin & dry...but the dry only was my quest.

It was two days of trial and error and it suddenly hit me (DUH, i can be so clueless!) Malber has a web site, I had looked at it and there were no extra instructions there, so I had crossed it off my list as a place for help... but when I went back and looked at the web page again, they had an email address. Lo and behold, when iIsent a note out to them, the next day I recieved an email back with very simple directions, the wash dial need to be in the stop position, except only the stop position at 6 o'clock on the dial would work for a dry only cycle. I tried it that night and sure enough, it worked. I sent a thank you note out to the Malber folks right away. I just wish the instruction booklet had been more helpful. I'll leave a note with the instructions when I go for the next tenant, thats for sure.

Anyhow, thats been my excitement - figuring out how the Malber washer/dryer works. It doesn't hold much, it does seem to take a while to work, and if you over load it it wrinkles like you wouldn't believe. However it is supposed to be very energy efficient and as a front loader, uses very little water for each load. I can do a small load every couple of days and that seems to be working out fine for me now. In Reenacting season, I might find it helpful to stop at a laundromat or something, but I've got a few months to figure that out yet. Anyhow, here's a glimpse of another corner of the new place for you.