Do dads perform their share of the housekeeping chores? Doubtful. Then why not pitch in? Laundry is easier and greener if it's done by a front loading washer. In this episode of Gear Daddy, Daddy Troy explains how front load washing machines can be one of the most energy saving appliances in your home. Green energy is important, so why not make sure your washer and dryer contribute to that? DadLabs Ep. 340 Gear Daddy. Brought to you by OxiClean Baby.

Daddy Troy: Welcome back to Gear Daddy, I’m your host Daddy Troy. Today I’m going to talk about the pros and cons of front-loading washers. This whole week at Dad Labs has been sponsored by Oxi Clean Baby. We’re giving away a lot of this stuff, so stick around until the end of the program, we’ll tell you how to get some.

Okay so I know what you’re thinking – you know, laundry room’s – dads, do those two always go together? Well dude this is the new fatherhood get over it – you share the responsibilities plus, hint from dad – women like it when guys do chores if you know what I mean.

So here we are today looking at front-loading washing machines, and I want to tell you about some of the advantages of them. First of all, when you have kids, you know you have one extra human being in the house – you’d think it would add just a few extra clothes? Wrong! You have tons of clothes to wash. What are you going to do? Well, a front-loading laundry machine actually has much larger capacity than a top loader, so therefore you can do a lot more clothes at any given time.

Plus, they can take things like comforters and these large bulky items, in the past you might have gone to the Laundromat in order to wash. And I tell you, your kid is going to do a lot of things to his or her blanket accidentally when they’re little kids that you’re going to want to wash them – so they’re great for that reason. The other thing I really like is the sanitize feature. In my house we turn down the water temperature so as not to scald our children when they’re taking a bath, which means the water in our house is not as hot – and as a result then, we need to get the water in here hotter. This is an on demand water heater – not necessarily particular to front loaders, but something you should look at if you’re a new parent looking for washing machines.

Also great for kids with allergies – if you have dust mites in your house, it can kill the dust mites and if you have virus’s going around – everyone’s getting sick, you really want to sanitize that laundry. There are many other reasons too and they are environmental reasons. Number one it uses a lot less water, and by using a lot less water – it also has to heat up less water. One of the biggest energy costs of doing laundry is heating up the water.

Also, they spin a lot faster than top-loaders, and by spinning faster you therefore have to do a lot less drying – which is really, really good as well. And also one of the hidden costs in laundry that most people don’t realize from municipalities is that delivering water to your house from, first purifying it and then delivering it to your house, is a large part of the electrical costs for your city. So all these things make it a real green way to go for your family.

Now there are some big drawbacks of these things – for instance, once they’re running, some of the machines wont let you stop and put extra things in. They also tend to be a little more expensive than top-loaders, but that will pay for itself in the long run. And in addition since they’re front loaders, they need to be high up off the ground – you’ll see down here, that I’ve built a platform for this guy right here myself, and you can purchase these platforms and they are fairly expensive – more expensive than a hunk of metal should be in my opinion, so I went ahead and built my own.

Well that’s all this week for Gear Daddy. Our whole week at Dad Labs has been sponsored by Oxi Clean Baby and I’m going to tell you a true story. I went home and told my wife that we were being sponsored by Oxi Clean Baby, and she flipped out! She said that stuff’s great, and I said that I know. So anyway, my family loves Oxi Clean, Oxi Clean Baby, and we’re giving away a bunch of this stuff, so go to dadlabs.com – upper right-hand corner of the website, click on Dad Labs crib, and if you register there you’re automatically registered to win a whole bunch of Oxi Clean Baby. We’ll see you next week on Gear Daddy, and all week long on dadlabs.com.