I was having a chat with some friends and we were talking about how, in the U.S. at least, washers are usually on the left and dryers on the right and why that might be. Someone pointed out that we wash first and then we dry. But then someone else pointed out that we are sort of primed to think in left-to-right terms already since that’s the direction in which we read. So here is my question:
Are washers usually on the right and dryers on the left in the Middle East?
US, but my washer is on the right, dryer on the left. I’ve never questioned it, lol. Though they came with the house (hey, if they ain’t broke) and I didn’t move them from where the previous owner had them.
How do the doors open? Every front load set I’ve seen comes from the factory with the doors set up to open to opposite sides, making washer left and dryer right by design. You can usually flip the dryer door for stacking but if you had them reversed they’d be right in the way, dividing both sides.
Mine’s a top load from 1997 so isn’t really an issue for me. May have to plan to shuffle them when these finally give out, though.
How about the dryer door, does it open to the middle of the two or to the side?
In Tennessee Water left, Dryer right. Florida, Dryer left, washer right. Let’s be real. Its however drunk the fucker is who cuts the exhaust/ electric holes
In my rental, they built it in 2018, I moved in in 2021 and we cut a hole for the dryer exhaust in 2022. Now most would say it should have been a fire before then. Those people were thankfully wrong. Took me almost a year to realize the vent did not exist… I assumed whoever hooked up the first dryer… uh check or the worker did their job
(I keep an annual don’t fuck this shit up list, it was on there thankfully)
Original hole was through the wall, down below the house and never exited. So Iy just filled “free space” below
Are the room and door arranged so that the washer is the first thing you come to when you walk in? I’d bet this is also a factor, in addition to the left-to-right thing.
It’s decided by builders, though, when they install the hookups and vent, so this question is really about what they are thinking, not any of us.
When the W&D hookups were installed, the basement was mostly unfinished and open-plan. Previous owner put up a wall to make a laundry room. Door opens right between them, so neither are the first thing you see.
I’m just assuming it’s questionable choices made by multiple previous owners all the way down lol.
Another commenter made the point that the washer placement is influenced by where the plumbing is, and plumbing generally fans out from one location where the main enters the house, and the direction of the sewer is also a factor for the drain. This is a bigger deal than running a duct for the dryer vent, which is a one off thing not dependent on a central system. So again, it gets back to the builders one way or another.
I suspect it has more to do with handedness- which is also partly why English and most western languages are written left-to-right in part because western writing systems were developed after ink or paint became the dominate means of writing over, for example, cuneiform clay or wax tablets. The reason for the switch was that ink would smudge in left-to-right.
In that regard, it might be “easier” to move things from left to right for most people (sorry lefties,) also most manufactures set it up to be moved in that direction and arrange the hinges to be set on that; and while it probably doesn’t really matter, it’s the order they went with. (for the record, you usually can have the doors swapped if you need to.)
I don’t think that handedness plays a huge role. I think that in some cases it’s simply random, and in other cases it’s “we write in this direction because that’s how we learned it”.
Inkwriting exists since at least the 2500 BCE, it was already used with hieroglyphs, and yet you see those being written left to right, right to left, boustrophedon, it’s a mess. Even with the Greek alphabet, people only stopped using boustrophedon so much around 300 BCE or so.
Plus if it played a role we’d see the opposite of what we see today - since the Arabic abjad clearly evolved among people who wrote with ink, that’s why it’s so cursive. In the meantime the favourite customary writing medium for Latin was wax tablets, where smudging ink is no issue:
Aussie here, my dryer is on the wall above my washing machine, common layout for top loaders.
I can’t answer that and, here in Japan, dryers are so rare that I can’t give a further-east perspective from a country that drives on the left and, at least when writing vertically, write right to left (horizontally was a mixed bag over the years but is now almost universally left-to-right). I can say that things like supermarket layouts tend to be laid out differently between right-drive and left-drive countries, though I think that effect is less pronounced in urban areas where fewer ever drive.
I’d like to point out that a lot of the world doesn’t even have separate (or even any) devices for drying. Especially areas like the Middle east, Africa, and Asia. It’s still very common to hang dry clothes in many warmer climates. Japan for example doesn’t use them very much because electricity prices are so high and space is so limited. They may also just be a combined washer and dryer unit in one that does both functions due to a lack of space.
