Introduction

It’s Sunday night. You have two psets waiting to be finished, but you just realized that you’re down to your last pair of clean socks. You leave all your stuff in the library, rush back to your dorm, and haul your two bags of dirty laundry down to the laundry room. You walk in, only to discover that not a single machine is open! Your choices are looking grim: either wait for the next open machine and use your last pset drop, or wear grimy socks the next day but finish your psets by a reasonable hour.

With only so many laundry machines in each house, the struggle to find the best laundry times is all too real. What are the times to avoid? When will machines be available? How does laundry usage vary across houses? To answer these pressing questions, we analyzed data from LaundryView, a website that records and displays laundry usage in real time. Using their weekly statistics information, we scraped data for each first-year dorm and upperclassman house laundry room, giving us average machine availability percentages for each hour and day of the week.

What are the best times to do laundry?

Figure 1: Percentage of machines used on average by time of week.

This graph, which tracks average laundry machine usage throughout the week (measured as the average percent of machines in a laundry room in use at any given time) reveals a few general trends. Specifically, there are four large peaks and four large dips throughout the week, where the “12” tick marks represent noon. These peaks, which line up with Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings and early afternoons, indicate the most popular days and times to do laundry.

The dips in laundry machine usage line up with Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, as well as Saturday nights. We suspect that classes, club meetings, and problem set deadlines falling on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays may explain the unpopularity of doing laundry on these days. Similarly, students would likely choose to attend social events on Friday and Saturday nights rather than staying in to do laundry, explaining the dip in machine usage at those times. Although the general trends in the data are very interesting, we’d like to be able to analyze the data on a smaller scale, so we separated laundry usage by day and hour.

What days and times have the highest machine availability?

Figure 2: Average percentage of machines used per day.

If you’re planning your schedule around the days that laundry machines are busiest as a whole, you might want to consider that Mondays, Fridays, and Sundays tend to have the heaviest machine usage overall and are therefore more hectic days to do laundry.

This may be because Mondays are when many students have just finished assignments due at the end of the weekend, Fridays are when students have the least classes and most free time before the weekend begins, and Sundays are the time to prepare for the upcoming week, since students have had time to relax and catch up on work. Meanwhile, Wednesday is the best day to do laundry, as it falls right in the middle of the week: most classes have work due towards the end of the week, so people are busy.

Figure 3: Average percentage of machines used per hour.

In terms of what times are the least busy, we analyzed the average machine usage at every hour of the day across days of the week. The data generally follows a smooth curve, with a dip in usage at 7PM during dinner hours. Machines are fullest in the afternoon, when classes have finished and people are returning more frequently to their dorms. Laundry usage experiences its low at 4AM, but the value is non-zero, meaning people exist who are folding their socks in the middle of the night.

What dorms/houses do the most and least laundry?

Figure 4: Average percentage of machines used per dorm/house.

Observing trends in this graph, we see that on average there is the highest laundry usage among the freshman dorms Thayer, Hurlbut, and Canaday and the upperclassmen houses Leverett, Currier, and Kirkland. The least laundry usage appears to be in freshman dorms Apley Court, Stoughton, and Wigglesworth and the upperclassmen dorms Adams, Cabot, and Quincy.

This suggests that, if you live nearby, it may be worth doing your laundry in one of the dorms that have a lower laundry room usage. Before we start pointing fingers and categorizing some dorms as “cleaner” than others, we recognize that the size of these dorms and houses impacts their laundry usage. For example, residents of smaller freshmen dorms likely do laundry in larger neighboring dorms. Additionally, for some houses or dorms, the number of laundry machines doesn’t always align with the total number of people in that house/dorm. Finally, some dorms may contain a higher number of students who purchase the on-campus laundry service, in which case these students would not use the laundry machines consistently, which may also skew the data. Potential future analysis to correct this limitation includes factoring in the ratio of laundry machines to house/dorm residents to better characterize laundry machine usage for that particular house or dorm.

Conclusions and Limitations

In conclusion, the laundry rooms are the least busy on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. In general, the best time of day to do laundry is in the early mornings (4am - 8am) and early evenings (6pm-7pm).

There are a few limitations to our conclusions: the data was scraped for only one week, so we anticipate that these trends may change during weeks when most students have more assignments, projects, or midterms. Additionally, the raw data we analyzed is a percentage value and does not represent the total number of machines used, so it is difficult to make comparisons between dorms/houses with very few machines and dorms/houses with many laundry machines. Next steps include examining the laundry room efficiency by taking into account the number of machines in each dorm and analyzing their frequency of use. Additionally, it would be interesting to analyze laundry usage in each house, which would allow people to see what the best or worst times are for their specific dorm.