Most marinas offer laundry facilities. You usually have to pay for each load of wash, and then pay again for each load of drying. Some marinas have had very inexpensive facilities so doing laundry is easy and affordable! Other places are outstandingly overpriced!
In the states, we found that laundry varied from Free, to $2.00 per load of wash, and usually the same price for the dryer.
Bermuda was more expensive, at closer to $5 per load, but then again, everything was much more expensive.
The Azores have been very inexpensive to live and moor in, with everything costing about 10% of the price in the United States. This holds true for almost everything, except for laundry! In the marina, laundry was €5 per load of wash, and again €5 per load of dryer.
The problem was, the dryer didn’t really work well and we thought that the unit must not be functioning properly.
Then we made our way to mainland Portugal and found that the wash is €3.50 per load, and the dryer is again, €3.50 per load. Once again, the dryer just doesn’t do its job! We aren’t sure yet, but we feel that this might be due to two factors.
Dryers consume a lot of energy and in Portugal, people are really concerned about energy usage. To make dryers consume less energy, they also seem to just work less well.
No one uses dryers because hanging clothes on a line dries they with no energy usage at all!
We decided to get with the program and setup our laundry lines on the deck. I tie the clothes lines to the rigging and we clip everything in place. Laundry done in the morning will be dry by the early afternoon and ready to be put away well before that evening. Best of all, hanging the laundry out to dry cuts the laundry bill in half!
