Washing Machines in Europe – Detailed Assessment of Consumption and Performance

Washing machines in Europe have to comply with regulations fixed in the Energy Label and Ecodesign legislation. They require declaration of the specific consumption and performance values which are deduced as average values from tests on three different treatments. Detailed data about the individual tests are normally not available to the public but just kept in the technical documentation of the manufacturer. Within the ATLETE II project 62 washing machines were measured to verify their compliance with the declared value. As this was an EU funded project all data are now also publicly available. This set of detailed measured data was used first to get a deeper inside into the performances and consumption values of the specific parameters and second to see how different the approaches are between manufacturers to achieve the same or similar declaration values. Additionally it could be shown that there are significant differences between those programmes used for the declaration and those offered as “normal” programmes to the consumer.