Fun Facts about your Washing Machine
Churning round and round in the basement, the washing machine usually spends its' useful life as an unappreciated member of the appliance family. A fully automatic washing machine is the envy of the developed world. The respect garnered by high visibility kitchen-based machinery such as the microwave is lost on lowly clothes processors. Let us pay homage to washing machine appliances, the sloshy workhorses of household appliances.
Is your washing machine running? You better go catch it.
An old joke, perhaps, but a joke that still brings belly laughs to Maytag repairmen and teenage boys. We don't know many more jokes about washing machines specifically. Actually, the preceding joke was adapted from a classic refrigerator joke, so to be completely honest we don't know any washing machine jokes at all.
- Washing Machines use about 22% of the total water consumed in the average United States home. Unsurprisingly, this number is much higher in homes where they don't understand the term 'money laundering'.
- Clothes washers use about .256 kilowatt-hours of electricity per load. A kilowatt-hour is 3.6 megajoules of energy. A joule is 10,000,000 ergs, although the erg unit has been deprecated because engineers were laughed at when they used it at parties.
- Clothes
washers typically account for 93% of the lost socks in a typical
American household. This number was provided by the National Dryer
Foundation. They still have no explanation for all that lint.
- Clothes washers operate on a horizontal axis, called a front-loader, or on a vertical axis, referred to as a top-loader. Front-loaders use energy more efficiently and clean clothes better. Converting a top-loader to a front-loader is problematic and tends to cause a dramatic increase in water usage.
- A "combo" unit includes both a washer and dryer in the same housing. This configuration saves space but usually offers less capacity than traditional side-by-side units. Very popular in Europe, these models tend to demonstrate the longest lifespan in France.
- Clothes Washers can be powered by renewable wind energy. However, climbing to the top of your windmill to add fabric softener can be terribly inconvenient.
- The Zanussi ZWF16581G washing machine turns at 1600 RPM.
- The earliest clothes washer was a rock in a stream.
Most Popular Nicknames That People Give Their Appliances
- Ceiling Fan: Albert Spinney
Clothes Iron: Charlton Preston
Commode: Barry Goldwater
Vacuum: J. Edgar Hoover
Freezer: IceCuba Gooding Jr.
Computer: Calculon
Refrigerator: David Defrost
Microwave: Abraham Blinkin
Clothes Dryer: Hilary Fluff
Washing Machine: Oprah Spinfrey
- Front door: Alicia Keys