How Washington ruined your washing machine
And my lighting, engine performance, gas mileage, toilets, dishwasher, etc. An article here. And they’re about to ruin your car some more.
12 Responses to “How Washington ruined your washing machine”
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March 18th, 2011 at 9:52 am
Oh, good. I was hoping to replace my WRX with an overpriced, underpowered with less legroom and cargo capacity when the time came.
March 18th, 2011 at 10:17 am
I have a high efficiency top loader that works great.
March 18th, 2011 at 10:20 am
While the company has had many problems, IMO had it not been for CAFE standards and other regulatory meddling forcing GM to make certain products in certain ways–rather than allowing the market to guide their business practices–we wouldn’t be calling it “government” motors these days. Just like the banking meltdown.
March 18th, 2011 at 10:21 am
Guav, I do too. how old is it? The new ones suck, apparently.
March 18th, 2011 at 10:26 am
While many of them claim to be “pro-choice”…most in Washington D.C. want to control or deny our choices:
March 18th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Ethanol does not “enrich” gasoline. It dilutes it. All an offshoot of the global warming scam. A hippies’ wet dream.
March 18th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
It is my understanding that the washing machines in Europe not only use less water and less energy, but they also get clothes cleaner and wear the fabric out slower. I learned about this when I read some fluff article about Steve Jobs importing his washing machine from Europe. Why don’t we have this in the United States? Apparently they take twice as long to wash your clothes, and American companies think we won’t stand for that.
March 18th, 2011 at 1:09 pm
hellerbreakfast:
Not a hippy’s wet dream. A corn farmer’s wet dream. Ethanol laws are a result of the corn lobby.
Although since the hippies all grew up and don’t really exist anymore, I suppose it’s possible that plenty of ex flower children are working for Archer Daniels Midland.
March 18th, 2011 at 1:13 pm
I just bought it a month ago, so it’s brand new.
Works fine for me, and I wash cloth diapers in it … which are, of course, pretty dirty.
March 18th, 2011 at 5:45 pm
Jay, your correct the Ethanol laws are making ADM rich and costing the animal producers dearly. Cash corn prices closed close to $6.75 3x what is sold for a few years ago, and Beans closed near 13.35 2.5x higher. Yes farmers are making money and the conglomerates are making a killing, but we will never grow ourselves out of importing oil using grain Ethanol. Hell, if we used every acre of grain for fuel production right now (and we had the capacity to convert it) we still would have to import oil.
Hellfer is correct in calling ethanol a dilutant, because it is ~1/4 as ‘energetic’ as gasoline. It’s also hygroscopic (attracts water) and rusts the hect out of things.
March 18th, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Jay- As an expat I can speak to this.
The American clothes washing machine has been refined over decades to do a good job by immersing everything in water and stirring it up a lot. For a given quantity of laundry, you need a given quantity of detergent and water. I made the mistake of purchasing a post-regulation top loader here, and discovered that making it “high efficiency” by reducing the water volume is a pretty bad idea if you want it to effectively clean clothing.
The Euro front loaders, on the other hand, have a small pool of water at the bottom and constantly lift the clothes and drop them into the water. This action is quite like repeatedly filling and wringing a sponge, it is very effective over time at moving the dirt out.
Differences?, well the Euro machines have a seal on the front door to keep the water in, and it is not a question of “if” that will leak but of when it will.
Laundry detergents sold in Europe have developed symbiotically with Euro machines, and detergents available in the US don’t work as well in them because the detergents here have been developed with immersion and agitation in mind. If you use detergent in customary American quantities in a Euro frontloader, instead of the teaspoonfull it requires, it actually cleans less well and you can damage the machine. Load capacity of the typical Euro machine is less than a typical US top-loader. And it takes hours to complete one single load.
But yes, one can buy both Euro machines and front-loading Samsungs that work on the same principle, even in the USA. Getting service may be a problem for new and obscure brands, and you have to develop different habits of laundry day timing and detergent use.
March 19th, 2011 at 1:27 am
I have never owned a top-loader. The first machine I can remember was my mom’s formidable late-40’s Bendix. We had a mid-50’s Westinghouse matched pair, with way cool convex windows, over 20 years. I bought a White-Westinghouse by Electrolux (just closed their last plant, in Iowa, yesterday–they’re ElectroMex now), whose amusing concrete-block internal balance weights were hard on the clutch, and now own a “Seerce.”
They all cleaned fast and well, used little water, none of them leaked, and only the greened-up computerized new one gets the stale water smell. Odd.
The Bendix is still made though — in Italy.