A system for monitoring the status of laundry appliances in a laundry taps into the busy/idle signal of the appliances to obtain status information. By tapping into the busy/idle signal through connections to the individual appliances, the monitoring system can generate a busy/idle status signal. These signals are communicated to laundry server through a local area network or internet link to allow compilation and processing of the data. Local or remote users gain access to the laundry server data through the LAN or Internet link.