Students watch Web to do their laundry – Company shows machine usage

Remember Sunday nights in college?

The sudden realization that you had nothing to wear Monday morning except for an ancient undershirt and a tattered pair of flare-leg corduroys. The frantic scramble for quarters. Lugging a canvas bag the size of a VW Beetle and a suitcase of Tide down to the laundry room — only to find 30 other people guarding the machines or their place in line.

By Christina Pazzanese, Globe Correspondent

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/02/08/students_watch_web_to_do_their_laundry/

While that secular purgatory known as the communal laundry room is a fact of life for many dorm and apartment dwellers, some relief may be on the way. Students at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham are trying out a new way to do laundry that uses the Internet to speed up the process.

Mac-Gray, a Cambridge company that installs and services laundry facilities in 400 colleges and universities nationwide, has recently begun testing a Web-based service at Olin and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. LaundryView is a Web browser that allows users to go online to check all laundry rooms on campus and see which washers and dryers are open, occupied, or broken; how long until a machine completes a cycle; and how many others are waiting.

Users can arrange for an e-mail to alert them when it’s time to put clothes into the dryer or rescue their wardrobe and fold it. Anyone with a computer, personal digital assistant, or Web-enabled cell phone can access the service.

Ordinary-looking commercial washers and dryers are wired to a box in each laundry room that tracks their usage and operational status. The company’s server then contacts each box and posts the data on the Web browser, with information updated every minute.

"The thing that makes this work is broadband connections. With schools, that’s a no-brainer," said Robert Tuttle, vice president of field technology at Mac-Gray. Tuttle hopes the program will prompt students to do their laundry more often and reduce the time it takes for broken machines to be put back in service.

If successful, the company hopes to roll out LaundryView to the 100 colleges and universities it now services in Greater Boston, as well as to some luxury condominium and apartment buildings.

Prompted by student dissatisfaction with the old system of writing names on a signup board, Olin officials agreed to try the service. For the school, LaundryView is a chance to offer students a "how-did-we-live-without-this" amenity at no cost, because Mac-Gray buys and maintains the equipment, including the browser. All the school does is keep the laundry room clean and collect a share of the revenue.

"The big convenience is, everyone’s time is precious," said Scott Slaboden, Olin’s assistant director of campus services. "Classes end and start at the same time, so this allows people to maximize their time." The school, now in its second year of existence, has 150 students living in one residence hall. A second dorm will open next year.

Because the entire Olin campus is wired as an ethernet network and students are required to have laptops, Slaboden said the school is a perfect fit for LaundryView.

"We try to stay on the cutting edge in all products," said Slaboden, who added that the school regularly asks vendors to use students as beta testers.

With the experiment a couple of weeks old, LaundyView is making the grade with the future engineers at Olin.

"LaundryView is nice because not only can you easily check the laundry rooms on all four floors, but you can also see how many people are waiting to be notified about available washers and dryers," said student Sarah Oliver via e-mail.

"I personally like [it]," said Frances Haugen, now in her second year. "It might be a little gimmicky, but I often forget when I put my laundry in and come back three hours later and my stuff is on the floor."

Haugen said she and her friends often leave a small window open on their computer desktops while studying to keep an eye on wash and dry cycles. Others get alerts text-messaged to their cellphones. "It has the potential to be useful, but right now it’s the cool factor."

"It’s easy to use, intuitive," said Jeffrey Satwicz, a sophomore.

As the school works to install electronic card readers to accept student "smart cards," now used to pay for meals in the campus dining hall, it is also looking into Mac-Gray’s electronically controlled laundry detergent dispensers. For now, though, students still have to raid vending machines to collect the 10 quarters to do a single load and lug that box of soap.

"We’re engineers, so we like pragmatic solutions," said Haugen. "College students don’t do laundry, so anything that makes the process easier is good."

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.