Conveniently located right next to our hotel in Paris, this automated self-laundromat served as a very important utility for our long European vacation. They have locations everywhere in the city...it was our first time using it, and it ended up being pretty intuitive.
These are all commercial washers, and none of them seemed to be out of order, which is always a good sign that the laundromat is being looked after. All machines are the commercial variety front-loading, with brands Electrolux and Miele. There are four sizes of washing machines: 6kg loads (4€); 7kg (4,5€); 13kg (8€), and 18kg(10€). The majority of machines are the 7kg variety, which is what we used. You would pick an empty machine first, load it with clothes and add-ons (detergent, fabric softener, and whitening agent). There is a central payment kiosk where you enter the 2digit number of your machine, and then can pay via cash or a tap of your credit card. These kisok is also used to dispense detergent or fabric softener from nearby vending machines. Once payment is accepted, the machine activates and you are able to make one choice (the temperature of the water). Once the machine starts, you can't stop it to open the door (we found this out when our Tide Pod got trapped near the door and wasn't dissolving)...luckily it finally did so a bit later. We used two Miele (7kg) machines, and its spin cycle was very fast thorough. This resulted in both of our loads, combined into one dryer, being done in 20 minutes. One pays to activate the dryer at a rate of 1,5€ per 10 minutes (like a parking meter, you repeat paying to add cumulative minutes). We did this 3 times, and the dryer told you how many minutes were left. We ended up not needing the last 10 minutes at all.
There are a lot of small details that must have been thought about to minimize maintenance for everyone. For example, the dryers didn't have any lint traps and there was no garbage cans nor sinks with running water nor an area to fold your clothes. The only thing provided are some carts to help you transfer your wet clothes to the drying area. The weakest link here is the payment kiosk....hopefully it has redundancy, because if it stops working, everything would stop.
Everybody who came in while we waited were locals. So obviously this set-up is working well, and us tourists get the benefit of having these stations so close to our lodgings, all over the city. read more