Mia Energy - Digital laundry room

Mia Energy control unit mounted on the wall

Brief

Starting point:

For decades, the laundry room in an apartment building ran on coin slots or dated card readers with stored credit. For tenants that meant cash, topped-up cards and a paper schedule on the wall. For the property management it meant emptying coin boxes, preparing statements and handling complaints by hand.

Objective:

What was needed was a fully digital solution that:

allows booking and payment without cash and without a laundry card,
connects washing machines and dryers of any make,
gives the property management a portal to create and manage authorised tenants,
and keeps working when there is no Wi-Fi in the laundry room.

Facts

2022

In operation since

CH

Deployed across Switzerland

3

Payment methods

100%

Software and hardware from a single source

Offline

Runs without Wi-Fi

Project steps

Strategy and analysis

The starting question was how to connect appliances of widely different makes and vintages to one common system. We analysed the interfaces present in the laundry rooms, the workflows of the property managers, and the requirements for billing that works without cash.

Hardware development

The result is a central control unit, installed once per laundry room, that releases the connected washing machines and dryers. Display, QR scanner and appliance buttons are laid out so that operation stays self-explanatory — including for tenants who paid with coins until yesterday.

Software and portal

In parallel we built the tenant application for booking, release and payment, along with the management portal. The portal is tiered: system administration looks after all sites, while each property management sees and manages only its own buildings and creates the authorised tenants there.

Industrialisation

The system has been in productive use since 2022 and is being rolled out across Switzerland. Software and hardware come from a single source, which means new sites can go live without modifying the existing appliances.

A person releasing a washing machine with their smartphone

Result

The coin slot has become a digital service. Tenants book their time slot, release the appliance by QR code and pay cashlessly — no laundry card, no stored credit, no trip to the management office. The property management, in turn, handles its buildings and authorised tenants in a portal instead of counting coins and preparing statements by hand. Because the control unit, the application and the portal all come from one source, hardware and software could be designed for each other rather than joined together afterwards. The system has been in use since 2022 and grows with every additional site.

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The digital laundry room