Planner

Weekly laundry load planner

This turns your household into a rough number of loads a week, spreads them over the days you choose and shows how long a laundry day takes. It is for people whose laundry keeps piling up and who want to see whether the problem is volume, timing or both. The result updates as you type, and nothing leaves your device.

How the planner works

Weekly loads are people times clothes loads per person, plus beds divided by the number of weeks between bedding washes, plus towel loads. The total is rounded up to a whole load. Loads per laundry day is the weekly total divided by the number of laundry days, rounded up.

For time, the planner assumes one washer and one dryer run back to back, so the dryer works on one load while the washer starts the next. Elapsed time is one wash cycle, plus one more cycle of whichever is slower (wash or dry) for each extra load, plus a final dry cycle. For a single load that is simply wash time plus dry time. Moving a load from washer to dryer, folding and putting away are not counted, which is why the real day is longer.

Worked example

Take two people with 2 clothes loads each, one bed washed every two weeks and no separate towel loads. Clothes are 4 loads, bedding is 0.5, and the total rounds up to 5. On 2 laundry days that is 3 loads on the busier day. With 60-minute cycles, three loads take 60 + 2 x 60 + 60 = 240 minutes, or 4 hours. On 3 days it falls to 2 loads and 3 hours.

Reading the result

If the loads per day come out at more than four or five, one more laundry day usually helps more than shorter cycles. If the weekly number looks higher than your habits suggest, a common cause is washing items after one wearing that are not dirty; the care-label and wear guidance in the articles below covers what actually needs washing. If it is lower than your experience, you probably have bulky items, sports gear or a baby, so raise the per-person figure.

Limits

• Different households vary a great deal. Babies, sport, work clothes and pets can push loads well above the default.
• The model has one washer and one dryer. A shared or laundromat setup with several machines will be faster.
• Air-drying does not use the dryer, so if you air-dry much of the week, the real time at the dryer is shorter.
• Large loads may need splitting by color or fabric, which raises the count.

Where this comes from

The method is simple arithmetic on figures you enter. The advice to spread laundry across several days rather than one long session is a planning idea drawn from the household-routine articles on this site, which in turn rely on extension service and manufacturer guidance on sorting and care. No published average of loads per person was used, because published household averages vary by country, year and survey, so the default of 2 is only an editable starting point.

Go deeper

• Organizing laundry so it does not pile up
• A laundry system for a busy household
• Laundry system guide: baskets, sorting and schedules