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Ever consider one of these?
https://www.lehmans.com/product/lehm...-with-wringer/
I guess you'd need water, though.......and if you didn't have electricity, you'd need a hand pump. If we had a hand pump, our water would turn everything orange because of the iron... But orange washed clean clothes would be better than dirty clothes. It would be cool to have all these back-up emergency things. I've been considering a hand pump that lets you access your well.
Way too lazy for that!
My grandma used hers into the 70's when all 10 kids got together and bought her a new washer/dryer set. It set next to the washer/dryer until she died in the late 90's....just in case.
When the 100 year old neighbor was getting close to passing (congestive heart failure started), I was offered her old first generation, electric with manual backup, wringer machine. A few years prior to that, we had an ice storm that knocked out our electricity, throughout the city. I did wash a small load with the old wash basin and washboard, and hung them to dry over a few days (no electricity, meant no fan on the furnace, but was still old enough to be thermocouple based). The neighbor, still had the old gravity furnace, so her house was one of the warmer ones in the neighborhood, which was a good thing, because we were without electricity for an extra week as four houses including ours, were on another transformer, they missed.
I hope to NEVER have to do that again. We are lazy and have things like that easy, compared to her and prior generations. (and I am really glad we didn't still have the coal furnaces)
Sometimes we're without power for awhile and it definitely is a harder life. I would rather have my dryer on the fritz than the washer. We have a small generator which helps keep the freezer and fridge going for small periods of time.
I remember seeing a wringer machine in our basement when I was little, but never saw it being used. That was the early 50's, when electric ones were quite available. I remember the cautions about getting your arm pulled into the wringer. :(
Yes, I love all those things that make our lives easier, but it definitely causes waste/resources/environmental problems now. I would like to have more back-up options available though.........but it can be expensive buying things for rare situations.
Everyone owns a lot more clothes now than earlier, so that would add to the work involved in doing it more manually. And we probably all wash more often and don't take care of our clothes like earlier times. Yep, we're all spoiled as heck now.
My mom used a wringer washing machine through the 60's.
I dated a boy in high school 1965 whose mom had a damaged arm from going through the wringer...guess they needed locking lids.