[blahedo]

I did the laundromat thing for four years in grad school, then ten years in various units with in-house washer and dryer, and then back to a laundromat for the last six years. It was undeniably convenient to be able to wash something on a moment's notice or at night or whatever, but I have to say I really like the fact that for a 2-3 hour investment of time every 3-4 weeks, I can get my laundry all done, at once, because the laundromat lets me work massively in parallel. And because I'm running it all in parallel, I can sort the loads differently for wash and dry: for washing, sort by colour, and for drying, by fabric delicacy (jeans can take high heat, anything with elastic stays on medium or low, etc etc). My landlord has said it's fine for me to buy a washer/dryer (there is a hookup in the basement) but I've found I'm really not in any rush to do so.

[freetime2]

We recently purchased a combination washer/dryer unit. We throw the dirty clothes every night before bed, set the timer (electricity prices here are lower over night), and the clothes are all washed, dried, and ready to be folded when we wake up in the morning. The only manual part of the process is folding/putting clothes away - but those tasks aren't really parallelizable anyway - so I fail to see how adding in a trip to a laundromat could yield better efficiencies.

Admittedly we don't really bother to separate anything (everything gets cold water, dry on low heat) - so you may be getting better results than us. :)

[honestoHeminway]

Im still waiting for soft robotics to solve the folding.