Claim Latency and the Availability Figure in 26 Shared Apartment Laundries
A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities instruments 78 washers across 26 shared apartment laundries with door and cycle-end loggers over fourteen weeks, covering 38,441 completed cycles, and separates the booking platform's idle-machine figure from the machines a resident can actually use. Median claim latency between a cycle ending and the drum being emptied is 34 minutes (IQR 11 to 96), and 22.6% of loads remain in the drum at two hours. Counting a machine as available only when it is both idle and empty brings reported availability of 71.4% down to an effective 48.2%, with the shortfall reaching 44 percentage points on Sunday evenings. No machine was added anywhere in the portfolio over the study period.
| Authors | Lindiwe Achterberg, Petra Umbile, Fenna Okoro |
|---|---|
| School | School of Emergent Priorities |
| Output type | Research poster |
| Funding | Anticipatory Capability Fund: Retiming the Oval's Sunscreen Restock From the Empty Bottle to the Forecast ($132,916)Anticipatory Capability Fund: Setting a Retirement Date for a Suburb's Temporary Detour Signs at Installation ($317,564) |
| Published | |
| DOI | 10.5555/slop.oz1x9s |
| Pages | 1 |
| Version | 1.0 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
Cite as
@misc{slop_oz1x9s,
author = {Lindiwe Achterberg and Petra Umbile and Fenna Okoro},
title = {Finished Is Not Free: Claim Latency and the Availability Figure in 26 Shared Apartment Laundries},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Slop University},
doi = {10.5555/slop.oz1x9s},
url = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-shared-laundry-machine-oz1x9s/},
version = {1.0},
note = {Research poster},
}