Greenwashing?
by Simon Handby in At home on 24.12.07
With visiting relatives in need of clean bedclothes, table cloths picking up stains from wine, cranberries and chocolate, and tea towels mopping up more than their usual share of dishwater, Christmas is a pretty busy time for the average family washing machine. But exactly how much electricity does it take to keep a festive house in clean linen and clothes?
Washing machines use electricity for several functions, but the components with the biggest thirst are the motor, which can use several hundred watts during a spin, and the heating element which can use a couple of thousand watts (kilowatts). With high-power components, and wash cycles that can last for a couple of hours, you’d expect a typical wash to get through a fair bit of power.
We decided to use our power meter to measure the electricity used by our washing machine during its busiest time of year. The model in question is a Hoover washer-dryer that’s at least a decade old and that has, to be honest, seen better days. Unlike modern machines which fill only with cold water, it fills with cold and with hot water from the boiler, which most sources seem to agree is wasteful.
That said, we measured the power consumed during a 60 degree wash of some cotton bed linen, and were expecting a higher figure than the 0.66 kilowatt hours (kWh) we recorded - roughly the same as running a kettle for 20 minutes.
We’ll let you know how the various washes add up over the week – we hope you don’t mind us airing our dirty laundry.
UPDATE - see our results, and information on the best temperature to wash at, in this post. If you’re interested in how much power other household items use, here’s a list of the ones we’ve tested.
We have a Hotpoint (WF 860) which also feeds from the bolier. We found it used 0.29 kWh but this was on a 30 deg wash (which ran for 48 minutes).
I’m intrigued that someone who uses a power meter to measure their consumption washes at 60 degrees - I’d be interested to know whether others feel that such a temperature is important for certain items? We wash everything at 30 degrees but is that unhygienic? The output certainly looks and smells fine.
02.01.2008 at 11:56 amGood question Alison, thanks. We’ve tried to answer it in this follow-up post - I hope you find it helpful.
Simon.
03.01.2008 at 1:03 pmwow what a cool website! but isnt it ironic how youhave to use the computer to veiw about the green issues!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
09.06.2008 at 8:00 pmhow much energy does a microwave usein a year on averege?
09.06.2008 at 8:03 pmHi Sangiomn - everyone uses their microwave differently, so it’s hard to say for sure. We did test how much electricity a microwave uses in a week, though.
As a very rough figure, you could just multiply our results for one week (2 kilowatt-hours) by 52 - just over 100 kWh per year, but it could be a lot more, or a lot less than that depending on your microwave model, power rating and how often you use it.
Hope that helps!
11.06.2008 at 1:07 pm