hey guys welcome back to how to switzerland sarah here today and
in today's video we are going to talk about doing laundry in switzerland
so this is episode two of our switzerland basics series so this series is all about the back to
basics if you are fresh in switzerland you just want to know how basic things work this
series is for you and we got so many requests for this one which is really funny but people are so
curious how to do laundry like a swiss how do the swiss do laundry what can i expect
when i move here so of course you all know by now i'm sure that switzerland is definitely a country
of rules and rule followers um so there are a lot of rules that come to doing
your laundry the main one that you need to know is that you cannot do laundry on sundays
your building will probably have signs that say that ours does the hours are on the door i'll
show everything when we get downstairs but you definitely cannot do laundry on sunday you can't
hang your clothes outside on the line on sunday so make sure you are getting your laundry in
monday through saturday next thing that you should know is that you cannot hang your clothes to dry
inside of your apartment this is in our lease and it probably will be in your lease as well
and the reason why they have this in leases is because swiss houses you guys have seen the videos
i'm sure where i'm showing you um around our swiss apartment um they're very sealed all the doors all
the windows extremely seal i would argue that you know most apartments are pretty much like
air proof how you say like no air is going in or out okay no air is going in or out so if you hang
dry clothes obviously the water goes somewhere and it will go into the walls into the ceiling
and that's not good so we do have two balconies in this apartment and we do hang it outside
in the summer but in the winter we have to hang everything downstairs in the drying room which we
will show you shortly so i keep saying i'll show you in a second that is because our washer and
dryer are downstairs in the basement so we live in like a relatively normal nice apartment building
but it is not necessarily standard in switzerland to have a washer and dryer in your unit for
your for yourself um you're more than likely going to have a shared laundry laundry machine
machine and dryer um you might get lucky i've talked about this before i'm not saying
every apartment does not have a washer dryer but it is a little bit unlikely especially if you are
in a big expensive city like zurich your chances are probably less and less than if you're in more
of a suburb you might have a little bit more space so you might have a washer and dryer
but i wouldn't expect it and it might be something that you need to compromise on
when you're searching for apartments you might have to let go of that dream of having a washer
in your unit but it certainly does exist i know people that have washer and dryer in the unit
but we do not the good news is if you are moving to zurich or switzerland from a big city like new
york where you don't even have washing machines in every building and you had to go to a laundromat
you probably will not have that situation here almost every building is going to have a washing
it's early i can't say washing machine a washer and a dryer in the basement so it's
not very likely that they'll say that there's no washing facilities facilities on the premises at
all it might happen but i have not seen it and we looked at a lot of apartments and we did not
really see that um but if you do find yourself in that situation there are not a lot of laundromats
here in zurich there are a few in smaller cities you might not find any self-service um laundromats
so yeah you'll probably have one in your apartment so in this apartment like i said we have a shared
washer and dryer and unfortunately we do have to pay for it separately it's not included in our
rent we have to pay for each load of laundry we looked at a ton of apartments and it was about 50
50. some of the buildings had laundry in the basement where you don't have to pay per load
and some of them you do have to pay but almost every single one that had a paid machine came
with a card like this it's not coin laundry that i have seen one of those before but it's more more
than likely you're going to have this kind of a card chip system so how this works is this is how
we pay per load um in our building we have to put 80 swiss francs on here at a time um that's a lot
of money to like put on this laundry card but you can't do less you can't do more you have to put
80 swiss francs on here so you take the 80 bucks cash you take the card you put it in the envelope
you put your unit number on it and you put it in the mailbox of the building maintenance guy
and he only uploads them every two weeks so do not let yourself get too low on funds at least
in our building i'm sure it's kind of standard maybe once a week or like for us only every
other week so two times a month we can put money on here so you want to make sure that you keep it
full so i've got my laundry i've got my little wonder card chip thing here let's go downstairs
okay so we are down in our laundry room and some things to point out so you might have a sign up
sheet like this where basically you just write in when you want to do the laundry so we have um
you know morning slot midday and evening slot so you can do laundry from 7am till 9pm and you can
sign up for those slots um months in advance in our apartment it's kind of like unofficial there's
one person that takes monday i always take tuesday it's tuesday um there's another guy that takes
like every other wednesday and then it's pretty much free for all but it's really not an issue
in our building but i have heard of people saying that they have really a hard time getting laundry
done that they can only do it like once a month if they're lucky um some apartments will give you
like a dedicated spot but we quite like having this because it has some flexibility so you can
see we have one washer one dryer some apartments again might have more than one we've toured some
that had a few washers um some had no dryers it just kind of depends but i can tell you that
a lot of people in switzerland i would say most people nobody in our building uses the dryer um
we have to pay for it and it just takes a long time and people are quite used to hanging their
clothes here in the room right next door so let's throw in some laundry so the one major difference
i've noticed with um laundry machines washers in switzerland is that the um drums are far
far smaller than the standard size in america i know that this is a very um like high-end
made in switzerland fauzou washing machine but the drum is actually relatively small and doesn't hold
a lot of clothes so i find myself doing a lot of loads um whereas in the us the drums were
like getting bigger and bigger every single year okay so then i have everything in i just need to
turn it on so this is how you power the machine so i'm going to go here and hit washing machine
and now it says great valen which means choose device i guess so washing machine big descartes
sorry for the horrible accent so i'm just going to hold this up and now it says my um like budget
on here my amounts on here is six dollars so now the machine has power going to it and i think it
just flashed that it's one frank per hour but i'm not exactly sure on the price but it's definitely
not expensive so in europe it seems that they tend to wash based on temperature in celsius obviously
so you're actually supposed to wash clothes on 40 i think but i usually do 60 and then to
save money i hit this little guy right here so it goes from 1 hour 13 to 39 it's a quick wash
for me that works just fine so we'll come back in 39 minutes and i'll show you how we hang the wash
okay the laundry is done definitely make sure you set a timer we always go upstairs and set a
timer because if you do leave it in for too long and you're not like signed up for the whole day
if somebody comes down and wants to do laundry i would say in my experience swiss people are
not shy about taking your stuff and putting it somewhere same goes for if you are taking
up a lot of space in the drying room and your clothes are dry if somebody needs space they're
not going to be shy to take your clothes down or go knock on your door and stuff like that i know
in some cultures that would be seen as quite confrontational but in my experience the swiss
are not really shy about doing that so just make sure you're respectful um and you move your stuff
as soon as possible also i wanted to point out we have a whole wall of rules i can't show you
everything but we have five pieces of paper here with all the things that you should and shouldn't
do and it actually says every time you use this room you're expected to clean the whole machine
like the top the inside clean the floors clean the filters um make sure that basically you're leaving
everything in pristine condition it's all noted here along with the hours you can use the machines
it's all in german um but yeah lots of rolls but let's go pull this stuff out and hang it up
so like i said line drawing is the thing here so we have this big room with these huge lines which
is actually really nice because it is february you cannot really hang your stuff outside right now
in the summer we have a bunch of lines in the back of the building so you can actually hang
the stuff out in the sun and in summer you can dry stuff in like 30 minutes which is really nice
but i find hanging stuff in winter in this kind of an environment it takes about 24 hours
or up to a day and a half kind of depends so yeah i'm just gonna hang this up okay back in
the apartment by the way if you're still here watching this i don't know 10 minute
video about how to do laundry let me know in the comments if you're still watching and by the way
i actually wanted to say for all the people that live in switzerland that are watching
please leave your experience with laundry in the comments down below i know it will really help
the people that are watching this video that are thinking about moving to switzerland and of course
every building every canton you know they're going to be slightly different so maybe right
where you live and just a little bit about your laundry situation do people take down your clothes
what kind of rules do you have leave your comments down below so everyone can um read about different
experiences that they might expect to run into if they move here but basically now i just want to
show you one last thing sorry i know this video is getting very long talking about how to do laundry
but i mentioned that we dry our clothes outside on the balcony in the summer i just wanted to show
you in case you've never seen one of these before i never saw one of these growing up in the united
states um so these are very common it's basically like a drying rack it's super handy this one's
just little from ikea and you can put on here like your socks and underwear pop it out on the balcony
and then we also have one that's large here it's basically the same kind of steel except it's sorry
we don't have a lot of closet space here this is our only closet actually um so it's just basically
the same but wider bigger and it has some wings that flap out and then we have some clips here
to hang it on here so these both just go on our balcony in the summer and also the ironing board
here i should point out when you if you're new to line drying your clothes you'll probably see that
you're gonna have to iron a lot more because stuff can get kind of like crunchy as opposed
to when you put stuff in the dryer it comes out fluffy um a lot of times your pants and shirts
and stuff will be kind of like crunchy crinkly so ironing them with like a lot of steam really helps
um on that front but that is it for today's video i hope you guys enjoyed this switzerland basics
we're definitely reading your comments about what videos you want to see which ones you think would
help you the most so we have all sorts of videos planned thanks for the support guys
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