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?
My dryer is on the right, but the direction the door swings makes it better that way. If it were on the left I would have trouble moving the wet clothes from the washer to the dryer without hitting the door all the time.
On my dryer, mirrored from the holes for the hinge, latch, and contact switch, there are another set of holes that have been punched out and covered with plastic caps.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think you could take off all that hardware, move the caps, and flip the door to the other side if that would work better for your setup.
Yeah, that’s probably true of most of them. I haven’t really looked at mine.
Been living in the US for almost exactly 40 years, never had a dryer on the right. Mostly Chicago and Detroit. I don’t think I would like the opposite. Is this really a norm I wasn’t aware of and somehow never encountered
Interesting question. I wonder how common dryers are in the Middle East? It’s famously hot and dry there so a dryer seems a bit redundant.
From what I’ve seen, both Israel and Australia (not in the middle east) stack the dryer over the washer most of the time.
I think my biggest takeaway from this so far is that dryers are just not a thing in most of the world. So TIL that.
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:
(sorry lefties,)
Now I wonder, as a lefty, if this is why I always hate the time I have to put everything in the dryer?
Could also be the flow of the house. Every house I’ve been in where the washer and dryer are side by side, the washer has been closer to the entrance of the wash room and the dryer is farther (and usually towards the back door). My thought process would be dump the clothes in the washer and then kick the basket in front of the dryer to pull them out later and get it more out of the walking path. (unless there’s room on top of the dryer)
Yeah it’s definitely depends on flow/ where the door is and where hookups are.
Aussie here, my dryer is on the wall above my washing machine, common layout for top loaders.
Do the doors open away from each other? So that you can m9ve stuff from one to the other?
I have a 2-in-1 due to space restrictions.
My washer loads from the top.
Are you talking about in people’s homes or in like laundromats? I’d be really curious to learn about a consistent placement in the middle east in particular, it never occured to me thinking this would be a thing anywhere in the world.
I live in Australia and have seen a lot of people’s homes for work reasons and can’t find a left/right pattern of dryer and washer placement. People just put them wherever they can, if anything dryers tend to be placed higher up (on the wall, at shoulder height) and washers are always on the ground but there is no left to right preference.
Some people even have the machines in different rooms, usually this is the washer in the laundry (or bathroom if no space for laundry) and the dryer in the garage or outside the house. As I already said these are just tendencies and you find plenty of people with different arrangements.
The discussion we were having involved the washers and dryers in our homes. Except for one person, it was always washer on the left, dryer on the right.
