How to do Laundry in a Hotel While Traveling

In this video I'll show you how to do laundry in your hotel or hostel while you're traveling. The best way to travel light using just a carry-on backpack is to take fewer clothes, focusing on lightweight synthetics or merino wool. My general rule is to pack for about a week, then do laundry and repeat. This way you can travel almost indefinitely out of just a small backpack. You can always take your clothes to a laundromat or have somebody else do them for you, but I find it's faster and more convenient to just wash them yourself. And you only need a few things to do this. Soap, a dry bag or a sink stopper, and a towel. You have a few options for soaps. You can either use a liquid, a solid, or a powder detergent. Solids and powders have the advantage of being easily transportable. They're not as messy as liquids and you're not restricted on the quantity going through airport security. There are a lot of brands out there if you search solid laundry bar, the most recognizable being Dr. Bronner's. You can also use laundry sheets like these ones from Sea to Summit. They're small, lightweight, but they tend to be more expensive. If you go with liquid soap, you're going to be restricted on the amount that you can carry through security and you're going to need a watertight container to carry it. Some of my favorite options are just these little Nelgene containers. This is one ounce, but you can get them larger. Or human gear stacks are a great option for a watertight container. Some other options are a pre-packaged laundry wash like this one from Sea to Summit. Or you can get these little pouches of individually packed detergent, which also work great. And then sometimes I try to get creative. This is actually a little bottle for baby food. It has a zip top on here and you can just pop it open, fill it with detergent. It's 3.4 ounces and then open the spout and just pour out. This works great because you can refill it with detergent from home, but this zipper closure top can get a little messy. You can use almost any soap you want. I tend to stay away from random things like dish soap. Fragrance-free and skin-sensitive soaps work great. For example, Dr. Bronner's has a version of this. It's a skin-sensitive unscented castile soap. Once you've decided on a soap, you have three options for washing your clothes. You can do them in a sink with a sink stopper. You can use a dry bag. Or if you're adventurous, you can wash them while you're wearing them in the shower. For the sink method, you're going to need a sink stopper. This universal one works everywhere I've ever tried it. The one caveat here is you don't know how clean your sink is going to be, so you probably want to wash it first. This method is fairly straightforward. You just fill the sink partially with warm water, add a little detergent, and then you're just going to want to agitate your clothes, squishing them around, rub them against each other for about two minutes. And then you just remove the sink stopper and rinse with clean water. The sink method works great, but it can be a little bit messy and is awkward if you're in a shared bathroom like a hostel. The easiest method, I think, is to just use a dry bag or a scrubba. I've experimented a few sizes. 5 liter on the smaller end, about the same size as the Scrubba Mini, or 12 liter on the upper end. The Scrubba works great. It has these little rubber nubs on the inside to increase agitation and get your clothes cleaner, but these things are expensive. This Mini here is about $40 compared to an under $10 5 liter dry bag. Scrubba's recommendation on the Mini is like a pair of socks and a pair of underwear. I think that's a little small. I added a t-shirt to this thing and it fits in here fine. This 5 liter dry bag is slightly larger. I have two t-shirts, one pair of socks, and one pair of underwear. These little bags work great for like underclothes, but they're a little bit small for larger bulky items. This is a 12 liter dry bag which is going to easily fit a pair of synthetic pants. This thing is plenty big enough for almost all of your clothes except for bulky sweaters or jackets. The concept here is really simple. You just fill these things up just above the level of clothes with warm water and add detergent. You want to roll both these bags about five times before you clip it. And then you need to get all the air out. The Scrubba is easy to use because it has this little air valve. The regular dry bag doesn't have an air valve, but try to squeeze out as much air as you can before you roll this thing up. Cleaning is all about agitation. The Scrubba, the little nubs are going to go on the bottom and then you're just going to rub your clothes back and forth for about two minutes. The same thing goes for the dry bag. Try to get as much air out as you can and then you just rub it back and forth on itself. There's no little plastic nubs, but it works almost as good. Once you've done that about two minutes, just fill it with clean water. Swish it around a little bit. You might need to do that a few times until all the soap is gone. Now that your clothes are clean, we need to dry them. The method that we're going to use here is the towel roll method, also known as the burrito wrap. You might be tempted to wring your clothes out to get as much water out as you can, but you don't want to do this because you're going to damage the fabric, especially delicates like merino wool. Just try to squeeze as much water out of your clothes as you can without twisting. For the burrito wrap, you want to take the largest towel you can find. Beach towel, hotel towels work great. You can use a little mini travel towel, but it's just not going to work as well. Now for the burrito wrap, just lay your towel out on the floor and put as many items of clothing as you can on here, being careful not to overlap. And now you just need to roll this up tightly. This is going to maximize the surface area of towel to clothing contact. And the best part, you're just going to step on this whole thing, making sure to put even pressure along the entire roll. And then when you take your clothes out of this thing, you're going to be surprised at how dry they already are. If you focus on lightweight synthetic or merino wool clothes, they're going to dry really quickly. If you do laundry in the evening, they should be dry by the morning. And then just hang your clothes wherever, trying to maximize airflow, back of a chair, balcony, on your bag wall, or you can use a little portable clothes line like this if you're somewhere that doesn't have a lot of places to hang your clothes. That's all I have for travel laundry. I'd love to know how you do laundry on the road. If you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments below. I hope you love this video. And again, thanks for watching.