Replace Your Washer and Dryer

  So, the power's out, or they broke down, and the machines are no good. Or, you just don't want to spend a few hundreds or thousands when you could donate it to us, or some random homeless person?

  There's a replacement for your top of the line washer and dryer...


  It's called a bucket, though your bathtub could work.

The Pre-Soak

  Not only can you soak your clothes in a bucket, but you can also enhance this.

  If you add a small amount of alkali to your water, any grease and skin oils on your clothes will turn to... soap. Baking soda is alkali. Wood ash, soaked in water, is wood lye, potassium hydroxide. This is insanely caustic and will dissolve your clothes, but if you just put a spoonful in a lot of water and add that, it is not so caustic.

  Ammonia is alkaline, and if you let your urine sit in a stoppered jar for a week and distill it into water, you will have clear, white, non-sudsing household ammonia. It comes from the decomposition of urea.

  If you let your clothes soak in water with slight alkali, all that skin oil becomes soap.

Agitation

  If you didn't add too much alkali, you can stick your hands in there and swoosh it around a little.


  Those too lazy to knead and agitate with their hands can stick a stick in it and churn it like butter.

Bleach

  Actual 'chlorine bleach' is chlorine gas, whose bleaching action was explored by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in the 1700s.

  You likely do not want to make that.

  The stuff they call chlorine bleach is usually sodium hypochlorite. It gets its bleaching power from oxygen, with no effect from chlorine whatsoever.

  It is quite literally common salt, NaCl, with a bunch of air bubbles to form NaOCl. This is why iron and steel tend to rust faster in the sea spray, and you can actually make it by adding a pinch of salt and stirring or shaking or blowing bubbles really, really hard until there's a lot of bubbles.

  This is also how 'borax' works. The agitation turns boric acid into the corresponding perborate by addition of oxygen via aeration formed by agitation of the water. Sodium chloride gives sodium hypochlorite instead.

Soap

  Much like dilute alkali will turn your skin oils to soap, it will also turn fats and vegetable oils to soap.


  Saturated fats, which are fairly solid to begin with, and monosaturated fats such as olive oil, are more likely to produce soaps solid at lower temperatures. Most other vegetable oils will tend towards a liquid soap.

Your Clothes Dryer

  If you string a rope or length of twine and hang your clothes from it to dry, this is called a "clothesline."


  This is normal, and well into the late 20th century, no idiot would spend a small fortune to replace a small length of rope. If you don't have an outside, you can string one in your shower, and if you cannot carve clothespins (yes, people used to carve clothespins by themselves), wrapping a pebble or two in the corner and tying a string around it can be used to hang both tarps, and hang clothes on a clothesline.


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