Eventually, when you have to decide between wearing either a tuxedo or your bachelorette.com t-shirt, it is probably time to wash some clothes.

Household chores are always more fun with company, so I invited Brooke over to help. 

She didn't sound too thrilled on the phone, so I tempted her by framing the work as a neat science project to determine how much water is evaporated while drying a load of laundry.

I also might have mentioned pressure spraying, manual and mechanical scrubbing with solvents or detergent solutions; vapor degreasing; ion bombardment; plasma, chemical, ultrasonic and ultraviolet/ozone cleaning, but we didn't really have time to try those experiments.

Our goal was to determine how much water was trapped in a load of wet clothes, and the first step was to weigh the load of dirty clothes.

My clothes had what I believe to be a typical load of grime, including dirty tube socks, my painter's pants, a pair of bloody gloves,  a vomit-encrusted fur coat, my party kilt, the Gatorade-stained tee-shirt and two pairs of muddy pants from grave-digging camp.

I loaded the laundry into a plastic bag and asked Brooke to weigh it with a spring scale. 

A spring scale isn't the most accurate device in the world, but I was secretly hoping I'd be able to detect how much dirt had been removed from the load of laundry once they were clean.

The dry load weighed 10 pounds.

Having a washer and dryer in your apartment or house is a wonderful thing that is easy to take for granted once it is installed. Doing laundry away from home can erase hours of free time and fistfuls of quarters.

Here is the equation: If laundry costs $6 a week at Suds your Duds, and a washer and dryer set costs $500, it will take 83 weeks (one year, seven months) to pay for the washer and dryer (not including energy cost). Or use the drop-down menu below:

Wherever you do your laundry, you will probably need to do some pre-laundry cleaning. 

Either with SHOUT laundry stain remover...

..or with concentrated SHOUT gel, with the fabric-safe brush-dispenser.

I've never used any other brand of pre-treatment. I always just figured that any stain remover that has a Broadway musical named after it must be the best.

Brooke loaded the clothes into the Tergotometer, and started the washing procedure.

I insisted that we add a few shots of peppermint Schnapps to help loosen the dirt, but Brooke didn't think that was a good idea...

Please read Drying Laundry Page Two.