The fastest way through a large pile of laundry is to stop treating it as one job. Running multiple machines at once turns a four hour afternoon into a little over an hour, and the only thing standing between those two outcomes is a few minutes of planning before you load the first drum.
Why running multiple machines at once beats one enormous load
The instinct is to find the biggest drum in the room and put everything in it. Splitting the pile across several machines is almost always the better move, for reasons that go beyond speed.
Total time stops being the sum of the loads and becomes the length of the longest cycle. Four washers running together finish in roughly the time one of them takes on its own.
Each group gets the settings it actually needs. Towels can run hot and long, shirts can run warm and short, and a dark load can run cold without dragging everything else down to the same setting.
Smaller loads rinse better, because there is more water available for less fabric, and extraction works better because a moderate load balances.
Drying is where the gain compounds. Four washers feeding four dryers means everything dries in parallel, and drying is the slower half of the trip.
A mistake also stays contained. If one group turns out to need a second wash, that is one small load rather than everything you own.
Decide the split before you touch a machine
Sort the whole pile onto a table first. Every decision after that point is easier if the groups already exist.
Split by what needs the same water temperature and the same cycle length, which usually lands on darks, lights, towels, and bedding.
Count the groups and decide right there how many washers you are willing to run.
The limit on running multiple machines at once is not how many washers are free. It is how many dryers you can reasonably expect to be free when those washers finish.
Never start more washers than you can dry. A wet load with nowhere to go is the one situation that costs more time than washing everything in a single drum would have.
Keep one group deliberately small. It is the one you can move first, and moving it first hands you a free dryer earlier than anything else will.
Stagger the starts by a few minutes
Starting four machines at the same moment feels efficient and creates a pile up at the other end.
If everything finishes at once you have four wet loads and one pair of hands. The last one sits in a drum while you deal with the first three.
Two or three minutes between starts is enough. A gap at the beginning becomes a gap at the end, and that gap is what you unload into.
Cycle lengths differ, so account for that as well. A heavy or hot cycle runs considerably longer than a normal one, and a gentle cycle can run longer still.
If one group needs a much longer cycle, start it first. Otherwise it finishes alone, well after you were ready to leave.
Loading takes longer than you expect once you are doing it four times over, so give yourself the room instead of racing the clock.
Group the loads that will finish together
Washing time and drying time are separate problems, and when you are running multiple machines at once the split that works for the washer is not always the split that works for the dryer.
Towels take roughly twice as long to dry as thin shirts. Putting them in the same dryer means either damp towels or cooked shirts, and there is no setting that avoids both.
So build the drying groups while you build the washing groups, and keep them identical wherever you can.
Heavy cotton goes with heavy cotton. Synthetics go with synthetics and come out sooner and at a lower heat.
Bedding is its own dryer load whatever else happens, because sheets need room to open out or they dry in a rope with a wet core.
When the groups are matched a dryer finishes as a unit, and you are folding instead of picking dry items out and restarting the rest.
Keeping track of which machine holds what
Running multiple machines at once falls apart at exactly one point, which is remembering what is where.
Write the machine numbers down. A note on a phone with the number and what is inside it takes ten seconds and removes the entire problem.
Better still, load in a consistent order. Left to right, in the same sequence as the baskets on the table, so the sequence itself becomes the record.
Park a cart or a basket in front of the machines you are using. It marks your row and gives you somewhere to unload into.
Note the finish times as well as the machine numbers. Most machines show a countdown, and the one ending first is the one you want to be standing near.
Do not wander far. Machines finishing unattended is how a load sits wet, and a load left wet in a closed drum starts to smell within an hour or two.
Dryers are the real bottleneck
Washers are quick and dryers are not, so plan any trip that involves multiple machines at once around the dryers rather than around the washers.
A wash cycle runs something like half an hour. Drying a heavy load takes twice that or more, which means the dryers are what you are genuinely queueing for.
Get the first wet load into a dryer the moment one is available rather than waiting to unload everything together.
Shake each item out as it goes in. A load that goes in as a compressed lump dries unevenly and takes far longer than it should.
Do not overfill a dryer either. Fabric dries when hot air moves through it, and a packed drum blocks that air the same way a packed washer blocks water.
Pull synthetics and thin items early. They are dry long before the heavy things are, and every extra minute after that is pure wear.
What actually goes wrong with multiple machines at once
The failures are predictable, which means every one of them is avoidable.
Forgetting a machine. The most common one by far, and the reason to write the numbers down instead of trusting memory.
Running out of dryers, which comes from starting more washers than the room can absorb.
Overfilling one drum in order to use one fewer machine, which loses more time in a second wash than the extra machine ever would have cost.
Mismatched cycle lengths, so three loads sit folded on the table while a fourth grinds on.
Losing small things between machines. Socks and anything small belong in a mesh bag whenever several loads are moving at the same time.
Leaving a finished load in a drum, which is inconsiderate when the room is busy and bad for the laundry regardless.
The Phoenix part
The conditions here are unusually favorable for running multiple machines at once, and one of them works directly on the bottleneck.
The air is dry for most of the year, and a dryer works by carrying moisture away in moving air. Air that starts dry has more capacity to take moisture on, so drying times here run shorter than they do in humid parts of the country. The dryer stage, which is normally what caps how many washers you can keep going, caps you less here.
Heat drives volume. A long stretch of very hot weather means light clothing changed more than once a day in plenty of households, and that produces a lot of small, lightly soiled loads instead of a few heavy ones. That is precisely the shape of laundry that suits several drums working in parallel.
Wind and fine dust are the third factor. Outer layers, work clothes, and anything hanging near an open door carry grit that belongs in a drum of its own rather than spread through a general load, which pushes the load count up by one on most trips.
Through the humid weeks of late summer the drying advantage narrows. That is the stretch to start fewer washers and keep the dryer count matched, because the thing that normally gives you slack has less of it to give.
Where several loads can run side by side
Parallel loads only work if enough machines are free at the same time and each one holds a real load.
The machines at our self-service laundry on North 16th Street run in a range of sizes so four separate groups can go in together, and the water volume in each drum means a smaller load still rinses properly instead of coming back out with detergent in it
Our machines and the store are cleaned daily.
Our wash-dry-fold service covers the everyday laundry.
For general guidance, The American Cleaning Institute publishes a laundry basics guide that is a useful cross-check.
The short version
Running multiple machines at once turns a long afternoon into about an hour, provided the planning happens before the first drum is loaded. Sort the whole pile into groups on a table, count the groups, and start only as many washers as you can expect to dry. Stagger the starts by two or three minutes so the finishes are staggered too, and start the longest cycle first. Match the drying groups to the washing groups, since towels take about twice as long to dry as thin shirts. Write the machine numbers down or load in a fixed left to right order. Dryers are the bottleneck, so move the first wet load the moment a dryer opens up.
WaveMAX Phoenix on North 16th is at 2825 N 16th St Suite 1, easy to reach from Phoenix and the surrounding area. If you have a load that will not fit at home, call us at 602-314-5706.