A Jet-Powered Laundry Chute?
It’s fun to learn about and discuss evolution in technologies for the home. Each new piece of tech tries to take us a step closer to a life full of labor-saving devices that take care of menial tasks so we have more free time. Now, evolution has come to the humble laundry chute.
The Laundry Jet uses air to move clothing, towels and other items to your laundry room. It’s similar in concept to a central vacuum though it doesn’t have the hoses and equipment to move around.
A single unit mounts in your laundry room (or wherever you want your laundry delivered). It plugs into a standard 110v receptacle though it can be used on 220/240v circuits as well. A six inch pipe connects up to four ports throughout your home and the maximum distance between port and unit is 200 feet.
The ports can be manually operated (you open it by hand) or motion sensitive so you just have to waive in front of the port. The system makes about 80 Decibels of noise. That’s similar to a vacuum cleaner… as you might expect. The system only runs when a port is opened.
The ports need to be connected to the unit so it knows when a port is opened. So, there’s a bit of wiring to be done in addition to running the 6” pipes though which the laundry flows. The wiring is low-voltage: cat 5 or newer like a computer network.
You can put bulky or wet/heavy items through the system without the possibility of clogging it. We don’t know if that means you’ll still have to walk your jeans. bathrobes, etc. to the laundry room. We’ve also not yet figured out how one would unclog an item in a pipe that could be up to 200’-0” long.
In Conclusion
We’re keeping an eye on this technology because we get requests for laundry chutes in residential designs. Our primary concern is the amount of air the system moves from one part of a house to another.
This system flows 100 cubic feet of air per minute. That’s an enormous amount of air flow - on par with a significant exhaust hood over a cooktop. The difference appears to be the air stays within the home and the duration is relatively quick. So, it doesn’t appear this would depressurize a space significantly though we’d like to know more.
Leave a comment to let us know if you’ve encountered one of these system in a home or used one. Would you put one in your home? If so, do you have any safety concerns?