Washing machine cycle times

Apologies gordon, I meant Front Loader…!

Having a “vacant moment” there, sorry and apologies to all others too!
Nat xx

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This proves the point, members are not interested tests on machines with long cycle times!

We have a 12 year old water/energy efficient Miele. All the standard cycles are 30 to 40 minutes. Intensive adds 10 to 20 minutes. Can program additional soak times adding a further 30min to 5 hours. Sometimes I add very long soak times to program a suitable end time rather than using delay start. It would rarely bother me if it did take 2 or 3 hours.
Who cares if it runs quietly in the back ground for a while.

This is th eissue I have with Choice, if the users of Front loaders are only using the short cycles (1/2-1hr) then the machines should be tested under these conditions.

I use our front loader on the Normal cycle, which takes about 2.5 hours. I don’t find this inconvenient at all. I either run it during the day while I’m at work (it has a delay function) or I start the wash within an hour of getting home from work. Sometimes I run it overnight as we have a laundry that is not close to our bedrooms, though I appreciate this doesn’t work for everyone.

Certainly I prefer a longer cleaner gentle wash in a front loader than a quicker dirtier rougher wash in a top loader. What matters more, fast or clean?

I don’t support Choice testing front loaders only on the quick setting (or ranking them on that basis). I’m happy to know how quick washes perform on different machines but if people want to prioritise the speed of the wash over how clean items come out then that’s up to them.

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There are so many things to consider. We used one of these recently. Good enough to make us reconsider doing away with the top loader. But perhaps not enough need to go to a combination washer drier.

Hitachi BD-SV110CL

image

Quiet, efficient?, rumble free and easy to access washing. 110V AC and not available in Australia.
33mins wash, 78l of water but that is for an 11kg load.

https://global.rakuten.com/en/store/koreda/item/bd-sv110cl/

It would be good to see Choice compare wash results between the long and short cycle times. For some of us leaving a load in while at work may be fine. For us getting the load washed ASAP is a morning priority as we loose drying sun soon after lunch.

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As a practical matter which short cycle would that be? Many washers have multiples to the point of being silly. Picking one at random would not do justice to the variations nor provide useful comparative information since the consumer could and would pick the most convenient that worked for him/her. In contrast the standard wash is what the manufacturer claims to deliver the most utility for cleaning, efficiency, and time.

My LG has a ‘refresh’ that is essentially a wash for 2-3 items, a 30 minute and a 60 minute, and each does a certain amount of self adjusting once the consumer adjusts temperature, spin, load size, and so on. So if say a 60 minute quick wash becomes 1:15, and a standard wash is 1:23, would that be worthwhile collecting data? A long wash? That is another option and the 1:23 can become 2:50 with all the rinses and the longer cycle and so on selected through options.

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If it was to become an added test I’d suggest the Choice testing team determine a benchmark fast cycle and test to that. Looking for a quick wash, somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes total cycle time from what members seem to say works. Test each machine on the manufacturer’s standard quick wash if less than the benchmark. Report on the time taken and result.

The standard Choice test results are indicative only. The short cycle result would serve the same purpose.

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LG products are automatically off our shopping list also. Four lemons from four different products.(including dishwasher, washing machine,TV and IT devices) Although everyone I talk to says good things about Bosch, my experience has been quite different for a few of their products. (including dishwasher and washing machine) Ironically, the best washing machine I have owned, and still do, is one of the imfamous Samsung top loaders that was recalled due to combustion issues.

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Is a cost/benefits equation applied regarding long cycle times and water conservation?

Is it worth powering a near two hour cycle time to save water when another machine using more water might complete a cycle in forty minutes?

How to weigh up environmental impact of water usage vs power consumption?

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Welcome to the Community @seamuswarren

I do not pretend to step in for @airedale but which is more important, water or power, will be locality dependent as well as whether the premise is running on or off grid, with a PV system and with or with out batteries.

In the middle of the bush where it rains irregularly or not at all for months at a time water would the the absolute priority while in ‘sunny Melbourne’ (sarcasm intended) over recent years water has not been an issue while the power grid has been and is rising as an issue, cost, and concern.

Showing the balance between power and water use using empiric metric of use seems as reasonable as it gets so a consumer can assess what is important to them, where they are.

As for some of the ridiculously long eco cycles? I once laughed but recently realised a 6 hour eco cycle can work a treat over night because time and thus duration don’t matter as long as one sleeps at least 6 hours and it gets the wash clean, plus off peak rates when available.

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@PhilT’s right in that whether water or power consumption is more important will depend on your situation.
Something else to throw into the mix is whether you wash in hot or cold water, and it’s a much bigger factor than length of cycle - the vast majority of the energy used by a washing machine goes to heating the wash water - running the motor and pumps uses very little energy in comparison. That’s a big part of why the energy consumption in our tests is different to what’s on the energy star label - we test in a cold wash, but the star ratings are calculated using a warm wash. Following this logic, it stands to reason that higher water consumption also means higher energy consumption, at least if you favour a warm wash.
Another note on those energy rating labels - for front loaders it’s simply a measure of how much energy the washing machine uses, as they have internal water heaters. For top loaders though, this figure also includes an estimate of the energy used by your hot water service to heat the wash water, as well as the energy used by the machine itself.

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I really wish I had not bought the top loader… it ended up being a massive fail, not in terms of how well it did the job (that was fine) but in terms of my backaches which I thought would go away if I used the TL and could sort of lean on it when bringing clothes out. I forgot how heavy wet clothes can be. A year later I switched to an Esatto FL which is no real problem, has some long and some short wash cycles, most are about 2 hours though. Best of all it does not rock’n’roll. But… I still often wish for that old Samsung which never gave me a minutes problem.

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