Which Washing Machine is the Best?#

Let’s start by getting the bad news out of the way - the reason x this isn’t an already answered question is because there isn’t an easy answer. How do you define “best”? Do you mean a machine that washes the most laundry per hour? A machine that cleans laundry in the shortest amount of time? Do you mean the best machine for the laundry of a 25 year old accountant who lives alone, or for the laundry of an auto mechanic with infant twins? Do you mean the most energy efficient machine? Do you mean a machine that cleans most reliably with the least amount of fiddling with cycle settings, or the machine that cleans many load types well even though it requires more attention to setup and during initiation? Do you mean the cheapest good machine? Do you mean the most reliable machine?

Confounding matters is the fact that (IMO) we’re in a dark time with regards to consumer appliances in the United States right now. The DOE energy and water use standards for washers and dryers put a bunch of constraints on appliance makers that make it difficult to make machines that “just work”. And the market tension between cost, functionality, and durability further complicates the picture.

The Best Machine Is (At Least Initially) The One You Have#

The best place to start is by figuring out what machine is best for you is to spend some time figuring out how to get a good wash from the machine you have now. To do this you’ll need a good flashlight, a thermometer, a scale, and a notebook and some patience. For flashlights I like to have a high CRI one which helps with color accuracy. My current favorite is the Wurkkos TS26S.

To start your investigations pick the cycle and settings you want to learn about and create a load that matches how you normally do laundry. You can use your oown normal dirty laundry if you’ve got it, or you can construct a standard test load that looks like your normal dirty laundry. I generally use 4.5kg dry weight of standard cotton textiles (aka a 1.5 bushel basket full of actual laundry or white cotton “test towels”), which lines up pretty well with how I wash. If you wash larger or smaller loads or different kinds of textiles you want your learning load to more closely match what you usually wash. Laundry is about time, temperature, chemistry and agitation, so let’s look at each of those things:

1. Water Levels

• How much water did your machine dispense? Note roughly where the standing water level wound up for the load. If there isn’t any standing water visible, are the clothes all completely wetted? If the drum comes to a rest do you see evidence of drips from the edges of clothes that show the detergent and water is circulating in the textiles even if the water levels are too low to produce visible standing water?
• Did the machine add any more water later in the wash stage? (Some machines and some cycles start with low water levels and increase the levels during the cycle.)

Water levels affect how your laundry chemistry reaches and interacts with your textiles, and affects solubilization and re-deposition dynamics. Cleaning cannot occur if there isn’t at least enough water to wet all the clothes and let the detergent move through the textiles.

2. Temperature(s)

• When the initial water filling is complete, pause the cycle and measure the temperature of the wash liquor with a thermostat. Note the temperature.
• Ideally, check the temperature again mid-cycle and at the end of the cycle.

Temperature is important for softening oily soils, activating enzymes to do their cleaning work, and activating oxidizers like sodium percarbonate. Using the most sophisticated wash chemistry you can compose in a cold water wash is just a waste of money and probably won’t get and keep your clothes clean long term.

3. Wash Stage Duration

• How long does the entire wash stage run? (Be careful here… some machines will report a long cycle time and then halfway through the wash decide that the long cycle time isn’t needed and shorten the wash stage, sometimes aggressively! Some machines use turbitity sensors to decide when cleaning is done. The bad news is that turbidity sensors are only good at picking up on particulate soils and not oily soils, especially in cycles with good water levels to enable good solubilization. This is why an LG front loader will report a long wash stage time for the heavy duty cycle and then dramatically shorten the wash stage time when it doesn’t see any particulate soils in the wash liquor. It’s also why the same LG machine will never shorten the already aggressively short wash stage on the towels cycle even if the towels go in completely clean. Cleaning towels is about cleaning sebum which the turbidity sensor can’t accurately detect!)

No amount of excellent chemistry is going to make up for wash stage that’s too short.

4. Drum/Agitation Dynamics

• Once the wash stage is actively working, check to see how the clothes are moving in the drum. For a top loader this is pretty straightforward. For a front loader it’s more complicated. Start by looking at how the textiles are cascading in the drum. Are they moving high up the side of the drum and dropping down percussively? Are they moving up the side of the drum less and rolling over without percussive action? If you can tolerate it, try to estimate the drum RPM and write it down. A big realization to have about front loader agitation is that it is a function of four variables: the drum rotation speed, the drum diameter, the friction coefficient of the textiles, and the water level in the cycle. This is one reason that different cycles have different drum rotation speeds (e.g. synthetics are more slippery than cottons so the cycle for synthetics will often spin the drum faster so they tumble properly). Cycles may also vary the drum speed based on the detected size of the load. To fully visualize what can go wrong here imagine you have a load that’s agitating perfectly. Now imagine you slow down the drum rotation, or make the textiles more slippery, or increase the water level. In each case if you make the change big enough you will wind up with a load that doesn’t tumble at all - it just sort of slides along the drum. This is what we’re trying to avoid in choosing cycles and cycle parameters, and it why checking your agitation is important.

Agitation/tumbling is the mechanical component of soils removal. If you have ineffective agitation in a load then you’ve turned your washing machine into a soaking machine and probably aren’t going to get the result you’re looking for.

5. Rinse Stages

• Lastly, make note of the number of rinse stages the cycle has. This can easily vary by cycle anywhere from a single rinse stage on a quick cycle to as many as three or more rinse stages on some cycles.

Properly cleaning clothes means rinsing them completely, and in order to do that reliably you’re going to need to know how many rinse stages are included by default in the cycles you use.

What If I Really Just Need to Buy a Machine Right Now?#

If you really just need to buy a machine right now there are basically two paths to choose from: top loader or front loader.

• If you want the simplest to operate machine possible you may find that you prefer a top loading machine. These machines don’t have internal heaters so your max wash temp is dicated by your water heater settings (and whatever energy saving shennanigans the machine implements). Most residental water heaters are set to 43C to 52C for safety, so you probably can’t get a true hot 60C wash from these machines. IMO you should only consider top loader machines with an agitator, a deep fill option, and a soak cycle option. You’ll need the agitation and the soak cycle time extension to help compensate for the lower wash temperatures… especially for tough loads. Speed Queen certainly has a fanbase, but I haven’t used one so I don’t have opinions to share.
• If you want to optimize for a machine that can be configured to handle more and different laundry scenarios and you don’t mind investing more time in learning how to get it to do what you want, you should probably look for a front loader machine with an internal heater and large direct-drive drum. I currently have two LG WM5800 machines, and while they are FAR from perfect I think they sit reasonably well at the intersection of cheap, good, and reliable. That said, they do have an unfortunate learning curve. Hopefully my writings on these machines can help you with that.

Advanced Temperature Measurement#

When you look at wash temperature you’ll notice it really isn’t accurately represented by a single number. Instead it’s a graph of temperatures over time. For example, a washer might fill at 40C, but then the temperature might drop over the duration of the wash stage. Or if the machine has an internal heater, it might fill at some temperature below the target and raise the temperature over the duration of the wash stage. Knowing an approximate temperature for your wash stage is helpful. But knowing the whole temperature curve can help you understand more details about how much time your load is above the sebum melt point, how long your optimal enzymatic period is, and whether or not your wash stage is warm enough to materially activate percarbonate. If you decide you want to take some measurements like this, you can use an industrial temperature logger. I have successfully used a Lascar EL-USB-1-Pro. For safety I tie it into a sock and put the sock in another small mesh delicates bag. I tend to pause the machine after wash cycle completes to remove the logger, but I have run it through the spin cycle before and it survived without incident.