The larger your family, the more laundry you’ll have building up by the end of the week. Cleaning the laundry can be a time consuming process. The more you have the longer it takes. You can reduce your laundry loads with some of the following tips.

Wear clothes more than once before washing. Beyond clothes that are visibly soiled or undergarments, hang your clothes up at the end of a day of wear them to keep them nice and wear them again.

Reduce your clothing “collection”. Or at least reduce what you wear each week. This may be a multiple vector issue for some. I personally do not care if I am seen wearing the same short twice in a week. Some feel this is a social no-no. To those I say this… I understand and I get it. But consider the clothing you will be wearing in a power out, survival situation. The mindset is different, but should it be? When we are forced to survive, our values change. So I ask you to consider that here.

Hang clothes out to dry. If you are using a dryer, you may want to invest in a drying rack. These racks can hold a decent amount of laundry and your clothes can dry over the course of a day instead of drying in the electric or gas dryer. I generally hang our towels and light clothes on the rack in the summer. Since we run a dehumidifier in the summer, the clothes dry in about 8 hours. You can dry your clothes on a rack 3/4 of the way and tumble dry for the last part, to fluff them up.

Reuse towels. Use your towels at least twice. Hang them up over the shower curtain rod or the towel rod to let them dry over the course of the day. After the second use, then wash them. Also using small towels to dry off will increase the amount of towels that you can fit in your load. If each regular sized towel you had were cut in half, and that smaller towel was used twice instead of once you would get 4x the usage from the same material you are using now.

Roll your own. You could make your own laundry detergent or use vinegar in place of fabric softener. This will certainly save money and reduce the amount of chemicals that you are putting on your body and into the environment. And vinegar only smells bad when it is wet. So if your clothes dry completely, you will not smell it on your clothes.

There you have it, now get moving toward laundry freedom.

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