My better half asked me the other day whether we had allowed for a laundry chute in the house plans.
It’s one of those moments where the blood drains out and I find myself floundering to come up some kind of excuse as to why it won’t happen.
The fact is that the upper story misses the laundry below by about 2m. We have a 400mm cavity between upper and lower stories. And, well, you do the math. Gravity is not going to come to the party.
It always had to be this way because of trade-offs we’d made on other important aspects of the building. So I wasn’t floundering over embarrassment of these trade-offs. No. I was floundering because, to date, I had managed to deliver on every single one of her requirements of the building.
- Lots of glass: Check
- Bathtub with a view: Check
- Polished concrete floor: Check
- Comfortable to live in: Check
And it seems like I had stumbled at the last hurdle. That hurt my pride.
So my sub-conscious went to work.
After a few days of mulling it over, I hit on the solution. Or rather, I hit upon the realisation that the problem had already been solved. Hospitals deliver their laundry throughout the building and don’t always rely on gravity! So after a little investigation the solution slowly started to reveal itself.
Hospitals, you see, deliver their laundry through a series of tubes via the magic of vacuum. The laundry bags create a seal in the tubes and the bags get whisked away down into the basement for collection by the laundry truck. It’s ingenious. Whoever conjured up that system deserves a medal. It’s a similar system that you see at the checkout registers in department stores, where money is put into special canisters which are placed into a hole in a chute. With the flick of a button the canister is whisked away to a vault somewhere else in the building.
So, if they can do it, then so can I!
Only… I have a big problem. You see, it’s all well and good using a vacuum where you can seal the tube, but my system would have to cater for everything from jeans to a small pair of socks. Requiring special laundry canisters to put our dirty clothes in would certainly not gain the much-needed WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor).
But then I hit upon the idea of using air velocity rather than vacuum. It solves all my problems. The air pressure would blast all manner of clothes, from the smallest to the largest, through a tube. So I thought I should create a prototype. But where to get a tornado generator?
As it turns out, there’s many tornado generators hanging out at the local hardware store, in the guise of a leaf blower. Check this out:
Take note of the variable speed. That should do the trick.
So I grabbed some 100mm pipe:
I stuffed the pipe full of t-shirts. I clumsily put the mouth of the leaf blower into the pipe and turned it on. There was an almighty blast of air and the t-shirts shot out the end like a cannon! They didn’t even touch the ground as they whacked against the wall in our apartment.
Yep, I think that will about do it.
Then I tried a pair of jeans and they got stuck in the bend. Can’t win them all.
But I felt like this prototype had given me enough information to start setting requirements for the final solution, namely:
- 150mm stormwater pipe
- Gentler bends, with the interior polished smooth.
Of course, there’s much, much more to the laundry chute:
- Opening the chute door will trigger the air pump to start. This will require some circuit logic, probably with a controller like an arduino.
- The clothes collector in the laundry will have a neat system to separate the clothes from the air flow. The collector unit will have to be airtight, with an access hatch to remove the clothes basket.
- The system should have an airflow meter so that the arduino can be alerted when airflow drops. The system will pulse the air pump to try and dislodge the obstruction.
- The system should be a closed loop, to prevent creating air pressure differences within the house. This would cause any closed doors, for example, to blast open. So it definitely needs a return air tube, which doubles the cost and adds more air resistance to the system.
So there’s lots to still work out, but I’m completely convinced that it’s feasible.
coombsbuild 