Laundry Water Usage Calculator

The washing machine is just a box. It takes in your dirty laundry, you push a button, and it spits out clean stuff. How much water go in? That never crosses your mind. This applies unless you’re watching your utility bill creep up or live in a drought area. In which case… How much does washer use?

The amount of water you use depends on the way you do laundry. If you have an old top loader with an agitator, one load of laundry could go up to 40 gallons (the difference in usage is equivalent to filling every bathtub in your house every few days!). If you’ve got a moddern day high-efficiency front loader, the number will be more like 13 gallons per full load. If you’re curious how much water your washing machine use, it’s not enough just to know what starts it. Your habits and kind of washer you have matter. This webpage calculate it all out for you (see below).

What Affects Your Washer’s Water Use?

Most of us think that choosing between wash settings only affects spin time or temperature. However, water volume is directly controlled through the cycle choice. Less water is used on a quick wash versus a heavy duty cycle. Heavy duty simply add more time to the wash and causes extra water fills due to soil removal. Switching from heavy to normal will save multiple gallons per load. For average household dirt levels, you won’t notice any difference in cleanliness.

Soil level behaves in a similar way, but is poorly understood. By default (or out of fear that something won’t come clean) it’s simple to set all loads to “heavy” soil. Telling the washing machine to agitate longer and use more water are good if you’re washing dirty sports gear with lots of mud or something else from construction site. For normal, cotton t-shirts, it’s counterproductive. Because the settings add up fast, the tool take them into account.

Using a heavy detergent? Adding an additional rinse for sensitive skin? You’ll be adding approximately eighteen percent more water to each load. Do that two times weekly, for a full 52-week year, and you’ve added hundreds of gallons to your yearly total.

Your washer’s age also factor into these numbers significantly. Newer high-efficiency washers use low water levels and more tumbling motion to clean the fabric. Older washers, those with central agitators, requires higher water levels so the load will float and tumble around the tub. The tool includes a handy reference table, which breaks out the baseline gallons by type of washer, helping you determine whether you’re an outlier or not. For example, those with a standard old-school top loader (from 15ish years back) are probably using almost three times the amount of water then someone with a new-fangled front loader. It doesn’t mean it’s time to upgrade, but it could of helped you decide if upgrading makes sense.

The other thing that impacts the outcome is the size of your load. You can run half-loads if you want, it’s easy. But it doesn’t work as efficient, since machine requires a certain amount of water to work correctly. So the load size factor help account for that. If you throw a couple things in because you was lazy, versus filling up the drum, it encourages you to consider how much laundry you do on a regular basis.

To really get an accurate estimate, spend a week tracking what you actualy wash. Total the number of towel, sheets, bed linens, pet blankets, etc. Plug them in and there you go… You will have a good sense of how many gallons of water each person use per week or per year.

There’s no need to beat yourself up over laundering your clothing! You simply want to understand where all the water is going, so you can make smart decisions around your washing habit and cycles. When you know what your own per-person gallons are, the abstract gallon takes on a more tangible context that you has some control over.