Spending Money to Save Money: Front-Loading Washing Machine

As you know if you’ve read my blog at all recently, we purchased a front-loading washing machine last week.  Now that I’ve had nearly a week to play with my new “toy”, I’m better able to determine what kind of savings we can expect in the long run by ditching our at least 20 year-old washer.

Immediately upon starting the first load I noticed how much less water this washer uses.  It actually uses a couple of sensors to ensure it only fills with as much water as is needed; it does a funny “fill a little, wait, repeat” pattern until it thinks it has enough water to clean the clothes.  It’s impossible for me to know how much water it’s using in a load, but reading online gave me an estimate of 12 gallons per average load.   This is a far cry from our old washer that used somewhere between 30 and 40 gallons per load.   It is obvious we will immediately see a savings in water usage.  And not only is it using less water per load, we have also been able to cut out at least 2 loads per week.  Before, we had to split the towels and baby clothes into 2 loads each and now they’ll all fit in one load.  That lets us use less detergent and less water and energy overall. This is very good.

Unfortunately, not everything costs less about this washer…  Since this is a high-efficiency front-loading washer, we had to buy new detergent that is compatible with HE washers.  I bought a small bottle so we could start using the washer that cost nearly as much as our bulk purchase from Sam’s Club.  After a bit of research, I was able to find the detergent we like at Amazon.com in HE variety.   If we purchase this detergent, we’ll be spending $0.175 per load on detergent, where we used to spend $0.1088 per load – nearly 7 cents more.  Overall, this isn’t a huge deal, but it did throw me off initially that I would be spending more.  Such is the cost of progress…

Estimated Savings (click to expand)

Being the stickler for numbers and spreadsheets, I put all these numbers together to estimate my yearly cost.  In the process of compiling the numbers and doing some research about my old washer, some interesting facts appeared.  My parents estimate they bought our old washer in 1984.  In 1984, the average washing machine used an whopping 1,243 kWh per year of electricity!  The Energy Star guide on our washer estimates it will use only 182 kWh in a year, while getting our clothes cleaner and, surprisingly, drier.   It uses 15% of the energy of our old washer and does a better job; I only wish I had known sooner.

After going through everything I could easily estimate or quantify, it looks like our old washer cost us over $300/year to operate and our new one will only cost $138.44 if all of the outside costs remain stable.   That means we will save $166.02 (not to mention the time and headaches) and those savings will add up to pay off our washer in just over 7 1/2 years – about half of an average washer’s lifespan.

It really does make sense sometimes to spend money to save in the long run.  Not only will we be saving money, we’ll also be using less resources.  This gives us a chance to be fiscally and environmentally frugal.

One cost I couldn’t quantify is the savings due to reduced drying times.  I mentioned that the clothes come out of this washer drier than from the old one.  Where we had to use a full drying cycle with the old washer, I was able to use somewhere between a 1/3 to a 1/2 drying cycle with the last load I ran – and the clothes were already dry most of the way through that abbreviated cycle!  I can’t wait to see the benefit to our electricity bill, especially over this year’s summer months.