I learn something new every day. Today I learned that I don't even want to think about how much water my family is using to do laundry.

Thanks for doing the legwork, Frank! Maybe you could wear everything two or three times before washing?

Don't be so miserly. Dump it back in the river so that I can drink it a few days from now.

Nothing beats a Staber for efficiency.

http://www.staber.com/

Of course, everything beats a Staber on price.

(Thankfully, they are built to last a lifetime.)

I have an "efficient" top loader too... it's true about the water, but i guess it depends on how much utilities cost in your area. In the same price range i would have gotten a front loader that used half the water but 3 times more electricity. Since water is dirt cheap here, the choice was obvious.

The washers here take HOURS to wash the clothes, who knows how much water used, and they're top loaders too. Also, using dryers is mandatory, no clothes lines allowed.

Well not so easy to compare as I thought since your typical US appliance is about the size of a UK starter home. But after some virtual shopping at Sears and much conversion of cu ft to litres it looks like an 'Energy Star' appliance is similar in performance to an A rated appliance over here in Europe (at present, - the rating system is due to be revised I believe).

Plants-
I would move...QUICK! That is a crock of shit.

The Fisher Paykel top loaders are suppose to be very efficient, i guess just not in water use.

From their website. You guys in New Zealand probably know more about them, since i think thats were the company is based.

When it spins up to 1000rpm it sounds like a jet engine, and yes, the clothes come out ALMOST dry...very little time on the (plants) CLOTHESLINE.
You can't imagine the horror stories we read about front loaders before buying. I was set on a Bosch, but the price just couldn't be justified over this model.
My plan is to pump the used water into a garbage can and repump that water back outside for water plants or something. We use "earth friendly" detergents here.

Probably true!

I sent an email to Sunfrost, a company that makes super efficient fridges, and asked them what they thought of the chest fridge idea. Their reply:
"Dear Peter,
It has been our experience that chest style refrigerators and freezer are no more efficient that traditional ones, just less convenient. It is the cooling of thermal mass that requires most of the energy and the opening and closing of doors makes little difference in energy usage. Our smaller refrigerators consume approximately the same .1 KWh per day as the one in the article. Let me know if you have any other questions.
-Chris"
Very nice of Chris to respond to me. I believe him, I just think the whole design of fridges is wrong. I know that every time I open my fridge, my feet get cold and the compressor kicks on. It can't be efficient. I have a kill a watt on the way and I will take some real world measurements of my 2 year old fridge.
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Peter

I hate that. It's so irrational as to be nearly beyond comprehension.

You can always dry them on yourself pal. Is it allowed overthere?

Well air has a specific heat capacity of approx 1.01 and a density that varies with temp and pressure but is obviously pretty low. Let's use 1.3 Kg / M3 which is 36.8g per cu ft. So for each cu ft of cold air that spills out you need 1.3 watts * 36.8 *20 (assumed temp difference in C or K) = 957 watts. So we can round this to 1 Kw for a second for each cu ft of empty air space.

This ignores temperature losses from the fridge contents which may be more significant but either way your man at Sunfrost is spot on.

If you want efficiency, better insulation and reducing the amount of produce cooled (e.g. don't leave the milk out of the fridge to get warm) are the things to concentrate on.

I don't know.
I think it's incredibly obnoxious and snobbish, but I don't know if "irrational" is a term I'd apply.

Bottom line, hanging clothes on a line is associated with low income people who are trying to save a few bucks. Also considered an eye sore by some.
So it's perfectly rational, in my view, that upper class ninnies would, in addition to banning loud colors, long grass, and junk cars, ban clothes lines so as not to offend their own condescending sensibilities.
Incredibly wasteful and elitist, in my opinion, but rational.

I don't really know what the energy consumption of top loaders is, but I do know they use a lot more water. Top loaders are basically unheard of in Europe.

I did once have a top loader, that a landlord provided in a rented apartement. However, it wasn't an American style top-loader, it was basically a European front loader, but with the door on the top, and a second door in the drum.

A typical European front loader uses about 10 (US) gallons of water and 0.6 kWh of electricity for a normal (8 lb) wash. A full load in a big machine (15 lb) is about 15 gallons and 1 kWh. (Those figures are for sanitary wash temperatures - if you were to wash cold, it would be about 0.25 kWh - 0.3 kWh). Typical detergent usage is about 2 oz per full load.

That level of water and energy use is such that it's probably more energy and water efficient to use the machine to do the washing, rather than try doing it by hand.

Well -- yes. If folks begin with a nearly completely different set of premises from mine, their results will seem bizarre and incomprehensible to me -- even if A follows B in a perfectly rational manner. But what about the 'A'?

Out of the dozen or so apartments I've lived in in my life, I believe clothes hanging was only allowed in one of them (and I've typically lived in some of the lower-cost apartments available). So, it's a pretty widespread ban, at least in the areas I've lived. The culture at large cares about this appearance.

I once or twice have seen workers spray-painting hillsides green, to give a weird impression of grass growing there. That has always struck me as one of the most irrational things I've ever seen with my own two eyes. Made my eyes hurt, trying to wrap my head around it. Yet that action came from fundamentally the same place, didn't it? The same 'A.' It's the belief that appearance is more important than reality.

I suppose the question is this: Is it not irrational to obtusely begin with a set of premises that has little to do with reality, and then expect that reason will supply one with reasonable results? The truly irrational step is the culture's initial general belief that humans are separate from ecological realities in the first place. The uber-elitism. The clothes line bans and the painted grass are just rational expressions of an irrational premise.