When Smart Moved In - The Laundry Room Doesn't Know What Day It Is
Nobody talks about the laundry room because we all dread it. Usually too small, stuffed with oversized machines that still can’t get the clothes dry the first time around, and a cat box somewhere close by.
It’s almost always built on the ground floor – as far away from the bedrooms and bathrooms where 99.99% of the laundry is created.
Apart from the machines and a self-cleaning litter box, it’s pretty much the room AI avoids and I want to forget.
I have a washer and dryer that were expensive enough to have a touchscreen and WiFi. They connect to an app. The app tells me the cycle is done. That's it. That's the intelligence. A $2,000 machine that sends me the same notification a $5 kitchen timer could handle.
The washer doesn't know what's in it. Doesn't know if it's towels, delicates or the dog's bed that should have been washed two weeks ago. It has "cycles" — Normal, Heavy, Delicate, Quick — and I pick one based on a guess and whatever my mother taught me twenty years ago that I half remember.
The matching set doesn't know I wash sheets on Sundays or that the kids' sports gear comes in on Wednesdays smelling like a crime scene. It is unaware I've been running the same towel load at the same temperature on the same cycle since I bought the thing, and that maybe it has an opinion about whether I'm doing it right.
It knows nothing. It just spins.
What would make it intelligent?
A laundry system that understands the household.
Sunday is always clean sheet day after I told it about my ritualistic approach to changing beds. In anticipation of the glorious event, Betty Lou (washer) would ask me if it was time to pre-heat the water. She’s getting ready. Clean sheet day is about to commence.
Every load is recognized by weight and fabric type — not from a setting I essentially choose with my eyes closed, but from sensors that can tell the difference between a pile of denim and a pile of cotton. It adjusts water, temperature, spin speed, and drying time accordingly. I don’t have to guess if I need HOT for 80 minutes. Can we just get a setting that is ‘DRY’—no mold?
And please, laundry overlords old and new, please can we get a “please don’t tie the sheets into a knot and leave them wet after an hour” setting?
The technology for this exists in commercial laundry (mostly). It just hasn't shown up in my house yet.
I want Betty to know the detergent is running low because it's been tracking usage against load count. Betty speaks to my Nest system and adds more soap to a shopping list that's already shared with whatever grocery system I use.
Ralph, the dryer, needs his vents cleaned because airflow has dropped 12 percent over the past month. He doesn't wait for the lint to catch fire. He’s proactive and I get a 5% reduction on my house insurance as a result.
And the scheduling. Right now, I start a load and forget about it. It sits wet in the washer for six hours because I got distracted. An intelligent system moves the process forward. Wash finishes, dryer is empty, transfer happens — or at minimum, the system makes noise until I deal with it because it knows wet laundry sitting in a drum is the first step toward rewashing everything.
We now have self-cleaning litter boxes – why can’t we have self-transferring washer/dryer combos? Why can’t the two machines share a brain and some connective tissue?
An intelligent laundry room is a logistics coordinator. It manages water, energy, supplies, scheduling, and maintenance across the most repetitive task in any household. And right now, the best it can do is ping my phone when the spin cycle stops.
The laundry room isn't sexy. Nobody's making a Super Bowl ad about it. But it's the room that runs every single week in nearly every household, and the "smart" home has absolutely nothing intelligent to offer it.
Next — the room where nobody wants AI but probably needs it most. The bedroom.
