3mo ago

I have a very strange question about washers, dryers and the Middle East.

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?

46 comments

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.
- Same with one person in the chat. But for the rest of us, it was always washer on the left, dryer on the right.
- 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.
  
  I know you didn't ask me, but since I'm the OP, it doesn't even matter in our case. It could be in either order. The washer opens at the top with a flip up door and the dryer opens from the front with a flip down door.
  
  You can almost always swap them though. Our 2000ish GEs are swappable. Same with my moms more recent LG. I had to swap hers because hers because the hookups were right to left (just makes the most sense in her laundry/mud room.
- 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.
- Same for my parents’ house when I was growing up, except that’s just how they chose to lay it out.
- That’s how it was in my last house, washer was on the right.. That’s how they had the hookups. Built in 2006.
- 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
  
  Let's be real. Its however drunk the fucker is who cuts the exhaust/ electric holes
  lol, true true.

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.
- Heat, alone, doesn't dry your clothes. If you've ever had a blocked exhaust tube on your dryer, you'll know that clothes can be hot and wet. You need the airflow to carry the evaporated water away.
  
  Like what you might find in a hot, dry region?

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.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Household-ownership-of-electric-clothes-dryers-in-select-countries_tbl1_345758611
- yup, central European here and I do not own a dryer and am not aware of anybody who does, I use a drying rack.

In US.
Given they need different types of hookups, the washer hookup goes wherever the plumbing is, then the dryer is put in the remaining space, wherever that is.
Given that the average laundry room is generally not in the exact center of a house, it makes sense that the washer would consequently often be closer to the room entrance (because that's more central to the house, where the plumbing is)
- Not in the US; in NZ most houses will have a "wash tub" - essentially a sink in a metal cabinet specifically for doing "dirty" jobs like laundry. That will have water hookups for the washer, so that goes next to it where there is space, then the dryer will do next to that or on top of the washer.
  The last few places I've lived in have all had the tub in a corner with space on its left, so it's been dryer, washer, tub. Annoying, my dryer door opens to the right and the washer to the left, so it's harder than it should be to move clothes between them

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.

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.

From what I've seen, both Israel and Australia (not in the middle east) stack the dryer over the washer most of the time.

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.

This decision is made for most people by the electrician who wired the house. This seems like as decent a hypothesis as any for why they seem to prefer washers to the left

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?

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.

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

All I have is anecdotal about the US and I only remember due to the annoyance. I’ve moved six times in the last seven years. I have swapped the direction of my dryer door every time because the side hookups were on changed every time. My dryer is currently on the left. Prior to these moves I couldn’t say with 100% certainty but if I try to picture myself in that laundry room I think my dryer was on the left but it isn’t something I paid attention to until I had to swap the dryer door hinges every time I moved since so my dryer door would open away from the washing machine.

Aussie here, my dryer is on the wall above my washing machine, common layout for top loaders.

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.

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.

Followup, are they usually stacked one atop the other in places that write using Kanji?

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