does half filling drum with washing ruin fabric over time?
When you half or quarter load a washing machine drum and it starts washing and 'violently' sloshes the washing around (ie lifter/paddles lifts washing to top of drum and then the washing slams to bottom of drum) could this not damage (this sloshing/slamming action) the garments over time and indeed the paddles of the machine , (or both) - I relise that the proper way to load the drum is not fill it right to the brim of the top of the drum, you have to leave a vertical hand width height of free space dont you? - but if you do that the clothes will slosh and rub against each other (friction - simulation of rubbing the clothes together) to get them clean , but when you half fill or quarter fill a drum they can slosh with quite a thud, especially in a 9kg size drum. ?
Solution Summary
AI-generated from this discussion
This thread was marked as solved. Here's a summary of the problem and the fix, generated from the discussion below.
Large drum underloaded with small wash loads may be unsuitable for fabrics and spinning
- The problem
- The question was whether repeatedly washing very small loads in a large-capacity washing machine drum could cause clothes to be thrown around harshly and potentially wear garments over time.
- Likely cause
- The accepted reply said a quarter load in a 9 kg drum is seriously underloading it, and even half loading a 9 kg drum is still underloading, though closer to a typical household wash size. The strongest supported explanation is that a large drum with too little laundry allows items to move more violently than intended and may also make load balancing for spin difficult.
- What fixed it
- No repair was discussed. The recommendation was effectively to avoid seriously underloading a large drum and to recognise that oversized drums may be inappropriate for households that usually wash smaller loads. The exact effect on long-term fabric wear was not confirmed with test evidence.
- Checks to try
- Load size discussed: quarter load in a 9 kg drum described as seriously underloading
- Half load in a 9 kg drum described as still underloading
- Accepted reply noted that underfilled large drums may not balance properly and may refuse to spin
4 Answers
Hello Andy. Several years ago manufacturers started to increase the size of drums and people bought into the idea that the bigger the drum the better. But unless you do a lot of big loads they can be uneconomical to use. They are only more economical if you wash twice as much as you used to at a time. It seems that many people just have the extra drum size in case there's something big they want to wash, but on a day-to-day basis they just wash the same loads they always used to. If you only quarter filled a 9 kg drum I would think that is seriously under loading. I would agree with you that it wouldn't really do the laundry much good.
Half filling a 9 kg drum is still under loading but 4 and a half kilograms of laundry is nearer to the average wash load for most people. So on the one hand it's under filling the drum but on the other hand it's not far off of a normal wash load. This shows why large capacity drums are often inappropriate for many people. If it isn't reasonably full, a lot of large capacity drums will not be able to balance the load properly. So they may refuse to spin some loads. This is not only inconvenient but can lead some people to believe they have a fault on their washing machine when it's just that there isn't enough laundry in to allow it to spin properly.
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whats even more deceiving is that a new Indesit Innex I bought has on its Fascia panel proudly displaying "from 1 to 9kg" with its big (62ltr is it?) drum and I have seen other manufacturers state this too .. so it sort of like is saying to consumers that its OK to wash very small loads
Aye, washing 1 kg of laundry in a 9 kg drum is a ridiculous waste of space.
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ah well at least the water level automatically adjusts the amount of water for the wash - would be silly to have enough water to wash 9kg of washing for only 1kg
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