 Alright, so why do I need washboards? Well many of you guys have been following us since the beginning when we first went off grid and know that we've encountered a lot of situations where we had to do water by hand. The first situation was back over the winter where our pipes had frozen or our pressure tank head, the bladder in it had exploded and that left us without water for 12 days where we were doing laundry by hand. Some of you guys saw the video where we did a makeshift laundry in a bucket using a toilet plunger, not the most ideal situation it did work for us over that period of time but I swore at that point that I was going to invest in some sort of washboards or something and I didn't and sure enough a couple weeks ago we had a second situation that came up where the wire burnt up that ran down to our natural spring and while we were repairing that it took about seven days where we were without water. By again we were doing laundry by hand and again I did not have washboards to do laundry. Again I was doing it with plunger and by hand and hand scrubbing and honestly there are many ways to do laundry by hand, just hand scrubbing or using some sort of plunger or they make actual laundry plungers. Some people like to take their clothes for a ride in a vehicle and let it just slosh around. I've personally found that that does not get the clothes clean enough. It really needs some sort of agitator, some sort of abrasive surface to get the clothes really nice and clean and so we decided to finally go ahead and get some of these washboards. Now a lot of you guys are probably like well I don't live off-grid so I don't need a washboard. I have no intention of doing my laundry by hand. Well you don't need to be living off-grid in order to have one of these. Think of a washboard as an insurance policy. If you guys live in hurricane areas or places where there's tornadoes or earthquakes or anywhere where there could be a lot of storms where there's power outages or where there's some sort of a water main break or anything like that where you might be without water, where you have to haul water or you're out without electricity and you can't use your washing machine. I promise you that having one of these is going to make all the difference in the world. So if you guys think you might want a washboard there's a couple things you might want to know before you go get one. The first one is where do I get a washboard? Right now there's only one company left in the United States that makes washboards and that's the Columbus Washboard company out of Ohio. That's where I got these washboards. These guys have been in business since the late 1800s and they still use tools from the 1900s and they hand assemble all of their washboards. So they are good quality washboards. They're like the real deal when it comes to washboards and that's where I got mine. And the second thing you're going to want to know is what type do I get? Well first of all there are two different sizes. Actually there's three different sizes but I got two to show you. This is the family sized one and as you can see it's compared to myself and compared to this bucket that I have here. This is a pretty good size for doing larger pieces of laundry like jeans and sheets and blankets and that kind of thing. And the second size is the pale size. This is for something like this maybe this small little dish pan over here or a small bucket that you might have. Obviously this isn't going to fit in that so having a smaller size is handy. They also have a mini travel size which is not one that I got to me. That's not something that I would use so that's not one size that I got but these are the two main sizes, family size and pale size. And both have their uses respectively depending on what you're doing. And the third thing you're going to want to know is what type of washboard to get. Now there are three different surfaces for cleaning laundry. The first surface is going to be galvanized steel. That's this one right here. The second one is stainless steel which is this one right here. And the third one is going to be glass. Now there is a purpose to each one and there's a reason for getting each one. The glass ones are for a high humidity area. These are really good for say if you live in the islands or in a place where the humidity's super, super high like here. This will prevent you won't have any issues with rusting whatsoever. So these are going to last a long time. The downside to having glass is it can break. Now the steel is going to be the best metal quality as far as rusting is concerned for a high humidity area. And then thirdly would be the galvanized steel which would be this one right here. Now the last thing you're going to need to know is what surface do I get. This is what is called wave and you can see there's no markings on it. It does have a wavy surface and it is still abrasive. The other type is going to be spiralized. And if you look closely you can see there are alternating cuts in this and the wave of this particular board. This is going to give a rougher surface for more of a deep clean. Now on the back of this you can use the backside where it's just kind of like the wave side. So it's nice and smooth. So you can use the front for something that requires more deep cleaning and then the back for say maybe your delicates. So those are the three different types of materials and that is the two different types of surfaces that you might want to consider. All right so now I'm going to show you how to use one of these washboards and we're going to do a little bit of laundry. Now before you get started you're going to need laundry soap. The preferred soap for washing laundry with a washboard is going to be a bar of laundry soap. I have two different types here. One is zote soap and the other one is still mapped up. Both of these I got from Walmart in the laundry section. This one has more of a laundry, clean smell. This one has sort of a medicinal smell. It kind of smells like your grandmother's medicine cabinet. You can choose which one you like to use but you know this one does have a different smell. Now you can use powdered laundry soap. The problem with that is it tends to not dissolve very well in the water. You have to have a really really hot water and agitated a lot to get it to dissolve and sometimes the powder will stick to the clothing and not rinse out all the way. You can also use liquid soap whether it be something like tide or like Dr. Bronner's here. The thing with liquid soap though is that you can't really get it into the stains with a washboard. It's not really preferred. It's good for soaking, not necessarily for scrubbing and it tends to be a lot more expensive. So you have your soap, you have your washboards and you're ready to do laundry. What's the first thing you do? Well if you have any really soiled, heavily soiled items, you're going to want to presoak those. These are things such as really muddy clothes or like maybe dirty diapers or something like that. You're going to want to presoak that and what I like to use is room temperature water. I have some of my cleaning rags in here. Most of you guys know that I tried and not use paper towels so I wipe up food stains and spills and stuff like that with these rags. These would be items that you like to presoak and I do put a little bit of Dr. Bronner's in there just to kind of help get the soaps out. But you're going to want to let the soak for at least a couple hours if not overnight and room temperature water and you're going to want to agitate it to kind of work some of that dirt out. Alright so we're going to leave these soaked while we get started with the rest of our laundry. The first thing we're going to want to do is get some hot water in this bucket and we're going to start with our whites. Alright so we have our whites in here in the hot water and we're going to take our wash board, cover it with water, take our bar soap and just cover the surface. Just like that. You can rest your bar soap at the top. Now we're going to start with our socks and anywhere that there is a stain, we're going to take that bar soap and we're just going to rub it in. And then we're going to take that and scrub it against our surface. Cover our wash board just like this. Now some people like to start with one end and it's crunch it up in their hand just like this and then do the other side. Now you can see I'm using the rough side of this spiralized wash board. You see how nice and soapy they've got. Now I'm going to rinse that in here just like that and we're going to ring it out and this is going to go into my rinse water and we're going to move on to the next one. And now we're going to rinse it. We're going to bring it out and then our rinse water. We're just going to keep doing that for all of our whites. Now you don't need to soap down the entire, something big like this like a towel. You don't need to soap down the entire towel. You can just hit the stain marks because it already soap on your board. You can re-sope it again if you need it. All right. And we're going to ring it out. All right. Now our clean laundry is in our rinse water and now you're just going to want to rinse it by hand just by moving it around and agitating it. All right. After you're done rinsing your clothes, you know that all the soap is out of them and it's really important that you get all the soap out because if there's any soap left in the clothes that's what's going to cause that mildewy smell. And you're going to ring it out and hang it up on your clothesline. So we'll show you a little trick with towels and big items. If you have someone to help you, they can twist one end while you twist the other. What I like to do is fold it in half. Twist as best you can. Now this isn't ringed out by far. So what you're going to want to do is find a pole like this. Wrap it around. Twist it a few times like this and then you're going to ring it. Now obviously if you have a hand wringer, that's going to work really well but this is an alternative if you don't have one like we don't have one. Because the more water you can get out, the faster these will dry. And the less chance again that they're going to mildew on you, especially if you live in a high humidity area. And then I'll do it again from a different angle. I'm going to build muscles doing this stuff. Hello chicken. Alright, now that's not too bad. Now we're going to hang that up. Now that your whites are done, we are going to start into our colors. And we are going to use our rinse water as our wash water and we're going to get some fresh water. Just this out, all this wash water because it's dirty water. We're going to dump this out and we're going to get fresh water to rinse in. So we're going to go backwards. I'm going to move this over here and this gets dumped. Alright, so our whites are done and now it's time to move on to our color clothes. I moved everything over here to the rinse water and there is still a little bit of residue with some soap in here. That's okay because we're going to be adding more soap to it and I put clean, hot water in this tub over here. So we're going to add our color clothes and that includes our bucket over here that's been soaking. We're just going to rinse these out and throw them in. I'll wring these out, not rinse them. You can see how dirty this water is. So that's why it's important to pre soak your laundry that's really, really dirty because you don't want to wash your clothes in that excess dirt. And this just gets dumped. And we can add our other clothes over here. Alright, and then you get started all over again. Start with your smaller items and then just work your way to your larger items. Just soak your board, any stains. And then you can put your laundry in. Alright, all of our laundry is done. Just a quick tip, anything that you have that has a logo on the front or if you have special buttons or things sticking off of it, you might want to turn it inside out because if you scratch it against that washboard, it does have the potential of scratching off your logo or ripping off your button. So just be a little bit careful about anything like that. When you're all done, all you need to do is obviously take out your soap, rinse off your board. And then just make sure you leave it out the dry. Make sure that wood dries. The better you take care of these, the less likely they are to rust and the longer they will last you. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about water. We once measured how much water that our washer takes and it takes somewhere between 26 and 30 gallons to do a load of laundry. I used about 25, 26 gallons to do this load of laundry here. So it's about the same whether you're washing by hand or doing it in a washing machine. Obviously, my preference is to do it in a washing machine. I have no desire for just the sake of washing by hand to wash things by hand. But in an emergency, which we have been in several times, I am very glad that I went ahead and got these. I do have several of them. Worst case scenario, they're a really cool decoration and they're a nice heirloom that I can hand down to my kids. But to actually have something like that, just in case of an emergency, that's a great, it's a great prep item to have. So I hope that's been helpful to you guys. Hope that's answered some questions about washboards and how to use them. If you guys out there use washboards, maybe you do things a little bit differently. Tell us down below what you do differently and what results you guys have had. And if you guys have any questions, again, leave those down below as well. We'll try to answer them as best we can. Hope this has been helpful. What's coming up in the next couple videos? Well, we got this coop that we're going to finish. We talked about that one before. I got baby chicks running everywhere. We have a new toy that we're going to be playing with that somebody had sent us and it's an awesome gift. So we're going to be really excited to share that with you guys. And like I said, we have this awesome prepping series coming up. That's actually going to be coming up really soon. So look for that and we'll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching. Are you swimming too? Hmm.