“The McCurdy Take” By “Daniel W McCurdy” PE (retired)

We are pleased to present this semi-regular heat treat column from “Mr. Dan McCurdy” (to find out more about this highly respected heat treat professional we would suggest this article; “Private Equity & Commercial Heat Treating/Advancements in Controls/LPC vs Batch IQ’s “Dan McCurdy” Speaks About it All”).

In this semi humorous column “Dan” points out the similarities between commercial heat treating and doing the laundry. After you have read the article we are sure you will agree with us that there are some very good lessons be learned about how to run a profitable and efficient commercial heat treat facility if you compare it to such a mundane task as doing the laundry.

Scheduling Your Heat Treat Shop – Or Your Home Laundry

I’ve often compared running a commercial heat treatment shop to running a full-service retail laundry business. They are both pure service businesses, where a customer gives you some items they own to apply a process to, and you apply the process, and you give the items back. No raw material or inventory required, just some equipment, energy, labor, and some supplies. Customers tend to be regulars, sending in the same ‘components’ over and over. Occasional issues pop up, but mostly it’s a pretty routine business.

But then I thought about how my own home laundry service works. The “simple business” of laundry is not so simple, as it turns out.

Consider the laundry room in your family home. There might be:

• A counter
• a faucet and sink,
• a washer,
• a dryer,
• a folded-up ironing board
• a rod holding for temporary storage of clothes on hangers
• a cabinet that contains all the needed supplies and hand tools including :
  • a measuring cup or two
  • a spray bottle of stain remover
  • a bottle of detergent
  • a bottle of fabric softener
  • a bottle of bleach
  • a box of dryer sheets
  • a clothes iron
• a supply of clothes hangers (scattered all around the house)
• A clothes hamper or two in or near the bedrooms
• There are also a couple of baskets which are used to collect or deliver clothes etc. from the hampers to the laundry room and then back again.

Now consider when and how the laundry room is operated:

• most days
• once per week
• only after family members have been complaining for days

Putting it all together, we now have on site:

• incoming and outgoing clothing, towels, and sheets
• A logistics capability (hampers, hangers and baskets)
• A processing department (washing plus either machine drying or air drying)
• A straightening department (iron and ironing board)
• An inspection capability
• A rework capability
• Express service capability

According to AI, the cost to run an average load through a home washer and dryer is around $3.00, not including labor, depreciation, or scrap. (Labor relations are a recurring dificulty, true labor cost is unknown but is rumored to be exorbitant.) The labor force is most congenial when all of the family’s laundry can all be done in a single session no more often than once per week, without anyone demanding express service.

How eficiently can this whole thing be operated? Surely an experienced production heat treater can put a plan together. Here is a generic router containing all of the operations performed in a home laundry:

1. Collect clothing and deliver to laundry room
2. Sort laundry into discreet piles, where all clothes in the same cycle are compatible with each other in every way except drying and ironing. Clothing, sheets, towels, rags, whites, colors, delicates, heavy work clothes, disgusting socks etc. There is actually a top secret matrix of illegal combinations, in the form of “never wash X with Y”, where X and Y are things that seem to change over time.
3. Split all large piles into 2 or more smaller piles to suit the max load size limitation of the washer/dryer. It is common for floor space being consumed by all of the piles exceeds the floor space available in the laundry room by a factor of 3. Use of the hallway is encouraged.
4. Before commencing any wash cycles, clean out the lint trap on the dryer. (Everyone forgets to do that until they’ve just loaded the dryer and started it before realizing that the lint trap has not been cleaned lately and might be ready to catch fire very soon.)
5. Consider what ought to be washed first. If there is a pile that contains a rush order, get it going first, easy decision and no stress so far.
6. Load the selected pile into the washer, piece by piece, checking to see if there are stains that might need a squirt of stain remover. Once everything is in, guess an appropriate cycle from the 10x5x7 matrix of possible knob settings on the washer, and press start to begin the cycle.
7. Realize that having just pressed the start button, there is nothing else to do for 45 minutes or so. Labor is now being wasted. Note that the dryer is also still down cold, as is the iron. Totally under- utilized, what a waste.
8. Then realize that when you split the first big pile up, you forgot an important piece of clothing that MUST go into the first load. Try to open the washer lid only to discover that the washer has a mechanism that prevents the door from being opened during a cycle. Force the interlock to be released by aborting the cycle, which takes almost 4 minutes these days in the name of safety.
9. When the washing machine finally grants access, throw the errant missing clothing item in, and start again.
10. After 45 minutes, the washer’s cycle end buzzer goes of. Now it’s time to get really eficient.
11. Open the washer and lift the entire load out in one go, with intent to dump the whole thing in the dryer.
12. Notice that the dryer door is still closed because no one has opened it yet.
13. Sit entire load back down on top of the dryer, open the dryer door, lift the load again, shove the load in, and close the dryer door.
14. Guess an appropriate cycle from the 10x5x7 matrix of possible knob settings on the dryer, and press start to begin the cycle.
15. Forgot to put a dryer sheet in – Stop the cycle, open the door, throw the dryer sheet in there, close the door again, and continue the dryer cycle.
16. The washer is now empty, ready for the next pile to go into the washer. This is too easy.
17. Pick up the next pile on the floor and throw it into the washer along with detergent and start it up.
18. Congratulate self, this is working well. We are at the highest possible eficiency. Plenty of time to relax for cofee.
19. A buzzer sounds, indicating an end-of-cycle alarm on one of the machines. It’s the washer, the dryer is still humming away.
20. Grab the wet clothes from the washer and pile them on top of the dryer, a homemade temporary storage point.
21. Put the next pile on the floor into the washer, add detergent, and start it up.
22. Note with satisfaction that with 3 loads in progress, we are now at absolutely the highest possible production rate. More cofee.
23. Another buzzer sounds. It’s the dryer finally. Apparently the dryer cycle time is more than 2X the washer cycle time. Never realized this before. It kind of makes sense, it’s way quicker to get things wet than to remove water from soaking wet cloths with hot air. Maybe dryers are under- powered? That can’t be right, they run on 220VAC. The real limits must be volume and the max temperature that clothing should be exposed to? Gotta look that up.
24. Time for a bathroom break. While doing that, a buzzer sounds – the dryer must be finally done.
25. Remove cloths from dryer and put them …on the dining room table, a new 4th station in the line. No more room on top of the dryer and these warm clothes need to be folded ASAP.
26. Take one of the standby wet loads and shove it in the dryer and start again. Possibly forgot a dryer sheet this time, can’t remember.
27. Rush over to the dining room table and start folding. After a couple of minutes 3-4 nicely folded stacks of folded laundry are sitting to one side on the table. It seems silly to deliver these clothes back to the bedrooms yet, better to wait and accumulate more in the stacks and run a more eficient delivery route later.
28. Another buzzer sounds. It’s the washer again. That machine is relentless. Need to program a longer cycle somehow.
29. Remove load from washer and squeeze it in on top of the dryer, back up to two loads there again.
30. Fire up the washer again.
31. Is it lunch time yet? Need a break. Nope, the dryer buzzer just sounded. Time for another folding session and need to reload the dryer.
32. At this point, a review. We’ve run 5 loads in the washer and just two in the dryer. The dryer turns out to be a huge constraint on how fast this laundry task can be completed! There is not enough room to put a second dryer in. Maybe we need to put a clothesline out back for air drying, which would unfortunately bring weather into the picture. Also, no clothes requiring ironing have been run yet – should we have done these first? And no towels have been washed yet, bet they take even longer to dry than the clothes washed so far.

The conclusion: The average consumer is trapped in a paradigm of one washer and one dryer per household. It is inevitable that the washer be throttled back. There are two ways to do this – let it sit empty more than half the time or run more, and smaller, loads and develop a production rhythm. Now I understand why my mate has been criticizing me for many years about my tendency for overloading our washer – she knows it’s a fool’s errand.

Now back to heat treating, where surely, problems like these don’t pop up much.

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