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If you rent your home, there’s a good chance one of your biggest pain points is laundry. If there’s no laundry in your unit or building, you’re stuck heading to a laundromat (or your parents’ house) on a regular basis. But there might be another solution: Just like the countertop dishwasher, you can buy yourself a portable washing machine for a few bills (there are even tiny, tiny ones designed to bring with you when you travel). But do portable washing machines actually work, and are they worth the investment?
Portable washing machines all work basically the same way: You hook a hose up to a faucet in your kitchen or bathroom, run a load of laundry as you would on any washing machine, then hook a drainage hose to your sink (or tub) and let the machine pump the water out. Some lower-end models require you to fill and drain them manually, but that’s a lot more work.
By and large, portable washing machines will get the job done in the sense that the clothing you put into them will come out clean. Because these machines are designed to be portable, you can move them around relatively easily, so you can store them in an out-of-the-way spot and wheel them out only on laundry days—an absolute must for tiny apartments.
That being said, there are some downsides to consider:
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There is, of course, one big pro to a portable washing machine: It will wash your clothes in your apartment. Any reputable portable washer you purchase will do the basic job, so the trade-off between convenience and the irritations of doing five hundred micro-loads in a leaking, kind of loud machine may very well be worth it to you. It’s not like laundromats or even a shared laundry in your building are especially quiet, hygienic places, after all. And considering the relative affordability of these machines (you can get a perfectly cromulent one for under $200), they make a solid investment in your quality of life.