I love it. I used to work for a company targeting markets in the developing world. It's really easy to take for granted the supply chains that exist all around us. I always like to see the creative solutions people come up with when resources are constrained.
PS: As an example, note the sheet-metal construction. In an industrialized country we would laser-cut all these parts. If you wanted to make this in an area with less infrastructure you might use a template and carbide gas torch to cut out the large shapes, then a hand punch to make the screw holes. More labor intensive, but still doable.
In an "industrialized" country we encase the real drum in a glued tight unopenable plastic enclosure to prevent the drum seals from being service replaced when they fail so that what used to be a small low cost repair now results in a forced new machine purchase.
I am interested in unit cost for mass production. It needs to be significantly cheaper than an old style top-loading washing machine to be affordable. The design of old style washing machine is mature and priced at around $100 for 8kg model. I suspect it can be stripped down further, remove water pump, remove program controlled inlet valve et al. to reduce the cost to below $50. Granted, washing machine like that needs electricity, but solar panel may be cheap enough.
One more thing, the water is not always easy to get in poor places. It is often much easier to carry laundry to a well, creak, or river than transport water to home. The path to the water sources may be a narrow trail often going up and down hills, so even with wheels on the machine, it is impractical to drag the machine to the water.
Extremely simple washing machines already exist, and I suspect on the order of 30-40 dollars. They are top-loading. No pumps. Turn one dial to let water in through the inlet. Turn another dial to let water out through the outlet valve. All manual, no pumps. Then flip switch to start spinning with electric motor, flip it back to stop spinning (no timers).
What you do is fill it with water. Add soap. Then put in first load of clothes and run it for 15 minutes. Then take out the clothes and put them in a tub. Repeat with second load of clothes in same soapy water. Once, all clothes are done, then put in fresh water. Run all loads through it to get the soap out. You are done.
(Relatively) richer people might have another machine that acts as a spinner. Otherwise, you just hang up the wet clothes outside.
Feel like replacing my piece of shit LG with this. It can only soak for a predetermined amount of time and if I try to pause it to soak longer it drains the water in 3 minutes. Plus, scrud!
My Mom had a washer that did this. I told her to unplug it to soak overnight. That worked, but she hated that thing, sold it, and took my sister's older washer that didn't have any "we know better than you do" features.
Most washers outside of Asia are horizontal, not vertical, so there is no lid to open. And the ancient tech ones in North America that load from the top don't have any electronics and are already immune.
It sounds kind of sarcastic, yet that was actually the personal thought also. Really sounds like its comparable to the amount of work with modern machines anyways. Couple minutes of hand cranking, and otherwise, approximately the same. Owned a modern washing machine for years, and not sure if I've ever used almost any of the settings or features other than, "load clothing on default, push start".
Probably sell well in a lot of developed world markets for people who just want to limit their electricity use, live away from the grid, have less reliance on complicated electronics, or minimize money use in an expensive society.
A big difference is that this can't properly centrifuge your clothes, while a normal washing machine can. This also needs manually filling and emptying, while a normal washing machine handles all that, including multiple rinse cycles.
You should use the bedding setting for large quilts and blankets, and the towels setting for towels, it really does work better. Experiment with the other settings so you can see the difference in wash time, water levels, spin speed and then you know which one to choose based on what you want for that load.
Oh and separate your laundry. Don't throw towels, blankets, and clothes in all at the same time.
Why separate laundry? I've tried it in the past, but don't do it anymore. Same result. The stains that can be cleaned get cleaned. The stains that would persist, persist. The only difference is the temperature setting.
As for separating colors - in my life I've had a piece of clothing stain other clothes 2 or 3 times. Once I put some white shirts and they came out pink because of another red shirt. Funny thing is, the pink was very uniform, so it looked as if the shirts were originally pink.
If my washing machine breaks, I'll get a second hand one. If I get a brand new washing machine, it will have to have a manual mode where I can set the desired program manually. For example, what is "towel setting"? If I can't see and modify the setting (e.g., A temperature for B minutes at C RPM, then D temp for E min for F RPM, etc.), I wouldn't use it.
Colors don't bleed much these days. Some might, e.g. on handmade clothing such as tyedye but most commercial colors don't.
If you wash items of different weights, fabrics, etc. together the load can get unbalanced more easily. Such as as single heavy towel or jacket in with a bunch of light synthetic items.
The "towels" setting uses warmer water and faster spin speed but an overall shorter cycle (at least on my washer) compared to the "normal" cycle. This probably presumes that towels usually are made of cotton and aren't very dirty.
I agree that a fully manual mode would be nice. My washer (LG) doesn't have that but by knowing what the various cycles and optional settings (e.g. soil level, extra rinse) do you can get pretty close to what you want.
> Colors don't bleed much these days. Some might, e.g. on handmade clothing such as tyedye but most commercial colors don't.
Sadly, with fast fashion, we've regressed to the point places like Shein/Fashion Nova sell pool attire vs swim suit that is not meant to get wet due to the dyes not holding when wet.
I was always confused doing laundry in the US. Warm cycle or cold cycle?
I have 30C, 40C and 60C depending on what I'm washing. I probably have more programs, but never use them.
For pillows and stuff I adjust spinning, from 1200 to 400 RPM.
And I use special short, low rpm handwash program for wool.
(Side loaded ofcourse, that way the dryer can be on top)
Top loaders don’t have seals that can fail (and smell), and they also wrong clothes when they spin at the end. The clothes experience about 200g, the extra 1g isn’t a big difference.
It depends. My clothing doesn't (typically) need to tumble for long whereas towels might and bedding needs to go for much longer. In general it's probably better for fabric to be washed for less time if possible. It wears out.
Also if you pay close attention you'll notice that things don't come fully clean (old machines didn't either) just "clean enough". Throw some well used dog bedding in with your shirts and this fact might become more readily noticable. So it makes sense to wash like-use with like-use for that reason alone.
Less time != less wear. Some of the longest programs just let the laundry sit with occasional agitation, similar to how the machine in this article works, in the name of energy saving.
Check the user manual. The default program is usually not the most energy and water efficient one but rather the mandatory one for certifying the machine.
Same thing for dishwashers, the “eco” program is often not the best especially if you have an “auto” one.
As it's the one for certifying the machine, it usually is the most energy and water efficient one. For washing machines the downside is that it takes 3 hours (or longer, if the machine was built before the EU capped it to 3h), for dishwashers the downside is that it stops being efficient once you realize that you have to run it a second time to actually get clean dishes.
For my new Bosch Benchmark dishwasher, "normal" actually uses 2.4 gallons and 1.25 kwh a load, is most efficient, and is quietest. There is no "eco" mode. "Auto" mode uses about twice the gallons no matter what's inside and slightly more kwh.
Maybe it’s a European thing. The eco program is the one mandated by law and the one they use for the energy rating.
But for machines that have a table showing power and water use, it’s never the most efficient one (in all the ones I checked). There is always a better program, it’s usually called “auto”.
Maybe it’s different in North America, idk what the rules are there.
Seems like the companies think we're too dumb in North America. My machines didn't come with any sort of tables. Someone else was saying their washing machine has actual temperature settings and RPM settings. None of the ones I've seen here tell us that, not even in the manual.
I've heard this before (and I don't have any reason to doubt your research) but I'm struggling to figure out why it would be the case.
Regulation 1016/2010 (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2010/1016/oj/eng) is the thing that establishes the various requirements for home dishwashers. It's pretty straightforward (most of the content establishing how efficiency is calculated). It basically just requires the default program to be "suitable to clean normally soiled tableware and that it is the most efficient programme in terms of its combined energy and water consumption for that type of tableware".
I could imagine some issues with how these numbers are calculated that reward "less efficient" devices or something like that, but it's pretty hard to figure out what that could be. Bit of a mystery!
I try to explain this to people, but they are so convinced by the 'eco' branding/rethoric that even when you demonstrate they still disbelieve, or more acuratly do not want to believe.
Yes, check the power and water usage table in the manual: all the ones I’ve checked (in Europe), the eco program is not eco when compared to others (especially auto if it’s there)
Eco is just the standard program they have to ship and must use for the energy efficiency rating.
My favorite modern "efficiency" feature has to be the machine refusing to unlock the door for me after it's been "too long". Okay, fine. Reset cycle, add some random item, whoops there went a bunch of water and detergent. Not my problem I guess. Say goodbye to those EnergyStar figures.
Nah, maybe the TC-5 could be argued to be relatively inefficient and pretty aggressive on delicate stuff (and loud), but the TR-7 is both efficient and gentle on clothing while being quiet. Have had one for a while and love it. No machine is perfect but this feels pretty close.
The TC5 is fine by me. I've never had a washer that worked this well. The noise level is the last thing I'm worried about when a meaningful cycle completes within 30 minutes.
Does being "inefficient" really matter for a washing machine if you don't live in the desert? Its not like they go through 100+ of gallons of water or ridiculous amounts of electricity even in the worst possible case scenarios.
At this point with having to read the manual to open the damned door I'm seriously thinking about attaching a belt drive, motor, driver circuit and esp32 running an http with spin/stop commands.
What's old is new again. It's surprising to see how surprised people get about this sort of thing - as if we skipped straight from hand-washing to computerized washing machines. One generation of living with technology and we forget how to live without it.
> We went back to the drawing board and really listened to the people we were designing for, for the context in which they lived. That research changed everything,”
I understand they had a very good idea to begin with, and more importantly their heart in the right place
And then further made it better with more input.
Reading the comments here the better solution for us is probably not to go back to "dumb" washing machines, but to regain control of how these machines are designed, for who and for what.
I'm thinking about Linux, which can be stripped down as small and nimble as needed to run a single board micro controller, or be large as needed to have everything to run an enterprise service. Being able to do the same with a washing machine would absolutely change their usefulness and place in our society.
I don't know how it could start, perhaps with an IKEA washing machine that actually needs assembly, for users to then tweak the parts, start comminities so we get at least in a KALLAX situation ?
>It works like this: after loading the clothes, detergent and water, and letting it sit for 10-15 minutes, users can close the lid and turn the handle for two minutes, repeating this twice more after ten minutes of letting the clothes sit in between spins. And voila — the machine can then be drained using the tap at the front.
I lived off-grid and did all of our laundry, a family of four (including a baby in cloth diapers), by hand, even in the winter (below -20F).
You know what works as well? A wash tub and a stick. Or a bucket and plunger. Or a posser if you're really fancy. I used a 30 gallon garbage can and a hand-carved posser. In mild or hot climates you can just stomp on it.
Same principle: Draw water, add cleanser, agitate for a couple of minutes, let it soak, return at some time in the future, agitate again. Remove laundry and let drip dry while you draw fresh water (mangles and spinners speed this up and are more effective, but not necessary). Squeeze wet laundry at lowest point where water has gathered. Repeat entire process with clean water, then lay it out in the sun prioritizing any sides with stains.
The secret sauce of clean laundry isn't how you agitate the laundry. It's just time and chemistry.
Water access, cleansing agents, and patience are fundamentally more important than providing "revolutionary" contraptions. It's the same difference between teaching people about no-knead bread and giving them hand-cranked stand-mixers. One solves the need for intensive manual labor and the other doesn't, but introduces a new point of failure.
And even importing enzyme-containing detergent is unnecessary. Plant ash (a source of alkali) and aged urine (a source of ammonia) are all you need to create what's known as bucking lye which cleans just as effectively and uses byproducts that they themselves produce by default. Residual stains are removed via UV from sun drying.
This is the sort of comment I was hoping to find. I have focused in this area - improving lives of the poorest as efficiently as possible - for a long time and my immediate thoughts about this washing machine was that it was overcomplicated and definitely far too expensive (for many reasons) to ever really make a difference. Though, that won't stop these folks from doing this and receiving donations for it into perpetuity.
So much is possible if you just look at how nature, in one way or another, can do the work for you. No knead bread (or, better, periodic stretch and folds over the course of a few hours) is a perfect example. Or making a composting toilet/latrine by just adding sawdust, ash etc. Or simple and cheap rocket stoves that burn the smoke. Or cover crops and cultivating soil structure and microbes. Etc
The key for what you shared (and, i suppose this machine) is how little agitation you actually need, and how there's plenty of ways to do it with no fancy equipment. Can you share more about your experience, or even share some links, about the amount of agitation needed, how "cleaning" actually works (you said time and chemistry - but how?), and how to make effective, low-cost detergents anywhere?
Your heart is in a better place than the NGO-contraption market, but what you also need to understand is that when you change a local optima in minimal ways, you also disrupt the rest of the local economy inadvertently.
Take the rocket stove as an example. It's an "improvement" over three stone and hearth fires, right? Less particulate in the air, less smoke, less ash, and more efficient use of fuel, all good things, right? Everyone has to work less to gather fuel, everyone's lungs are happier, and so on.
But not quite.
The rocket stove reduces ash yield, reducing one universally useful by-product. The rocket stove minimizes smoke production, so instead of creosote deposits on the walls acting as a general biocidal agent and lowering air humidity, there's now high humidity with exposed walls, an ideal climate for mold growth. Ever wonder why traditional pit-houses and earth-lodges rarely had issues with mold and damp and typically annually fumigated their entire homes with smoke? Or why women in some Northern and Eastern Europe peoples gave birth in saunas even prior to the advent of germ theory? The answer is smoke is useful, not only for creating relatively sterile environments, not only from molds, but also bugs.
Chronic smoke exposure imposes real respiratory costs, but traditional societies tolerated those costs because smoke simultaneously provided insect control, food preservation, fumigation, and moisture regulation. Interventions that remove smoke without deliberately replacing those functions often trade one health burden for several others. And the simplest way to achieve all of those functions is the same way humans have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years.
The rocket stove minimizes fuel use, so instead of heating and cooking, you just end up with cooking (and note that the rocket mass heater doesn't solve this problem, which is just banking heat rather than using it more efficiently). This separation "works" in hotter climates, but at that point, why are you cooking indoors to begin with? And again, the reduction in smoke makes insects (namely mosquitoes) much more likely to discern where breathing humans are and able to reach within biting distance.
Generally, traditional practices often encode systems-level knowledge that modern interventions ignore. Diffusion of traditional practices will generally be better than trying to invent a better mousetrap.
As far as cleaning goes, as in the saponification and misculation of fats, the gist is to treat a fat with an alkali with agitation and time. Heat speeds up the process (hot process), but enough time completes the reaction (cold process). Soap and detergents are just rapid versions of this process, but aren't at all necessary, so long as you have water and ash.
It's the same reason when washing your hands you're "supposed to" sing happy birthday twice while agitating your hands. The soap is engaging in a chemical reaction with the fats on the your hands that takes more time because the human body can only tolerate so hot a temperature of water. You can use cold water and wait longer and have the same effect. The same thing is true of washing clothes, dishes, or whole bodies.
The Romans understood this. The baths were alkaline. They rubbed themselves with olive oil, used a stirgil (something like a frosting knife) to squeegee off the oil, then went in the pool. The alkali in the warm water combined with the residual olive oil and basically creates soap on your skin that is then rubbed off.
It's the same reason that Romans were able to have lily-white togas despite not having modern enzymatic cleaners and chlorine-based bleaches. They had lant and wood-ash alkali:
In short, my experience is that I've improved my own life by observing what the time-rich resource-poor peoples of the world do rather than the inverse.
The metal design in the article is still more flexible and durable. I also assumed the Japanese version would be targeted at disaster situations and/or remote mountain areas and be more repairable, but the cost saving part seems to be a major selling point.
The clothes falling down from the upper half is described on the slides, so I assume the rotation isn't fast enough for the clothes to stick to the walls, or it has an elliptical rotor to make sure there a speed difference ?
For many reasons, I expect to see a lot of new products and solutions going against the main trends of locking down the user, planned obsolence, rent seeking from buyers, and limiting their choices.
Imagining a company shipping the home appliances equivalent to Frame.work laptops: open, reparable, hackable, and upgradable. I would happily connect them to my home wifi, program them the way I want, and have one hub that allows me to monitor health, upgrade firmware, control functionality.
Sadly arm strength and endurance is way worse than legs, this should obviously work with pedals like a bicycle. I would even be ready to buy one to replace my daily commute when working from home.
You'd be surprised at the places that have electricity, like houses in middle of nowhere, central asia. One of the challenges with engineering technology for the global south is that poverty is wildly different for different people. I met a professor working on flatpack windmills to pump water/electricity. The major challenges he kept seeing in the the Andes weren't the sorts of longevity/efficiency/logistics issues we usually solve with standard engineering, but how the products interacted with local politics and society.
To add to AlotOfReading's point, many places have some electricity, just utterly unreliable.
It might be down a few hours every day, or completely cut for days after storms or infra degradation, or the current fluctuate too much for delicate electronics. Many places could also get hold of a gasoline generator.
These kind of variations could require more thinking on the design, but being able to use electricity when available and hand power when needed would be the best.
Ideally the people on the ground thinking about their specific issues and having open ways to adapt the machine for it opens the door for many kind of evolutions.
He started in 2018. In 2021 he had shipped 30 (to Iraq). Wanted to ship 7500 in the next 3 years.
Fast foward to 2025: he has shipped 500 in 13 countries.
Hopefully, with his partnerships and local production (in India) his ramp-up will fasten up. I wish him luck.
I really like the practicality and simplicity of this.
Designing stuff for real humans to use, is really difficult, and really humbling.
In my experience, defense contractors really have to take the user context into account. It can be life or death. I used to work for one, and seeing the stuff come back from the field, was a lesson in humility.
There are lots of little hand-crank washing machines on Alibaba and Amazon. Most are plastic and rather fragile looking. Many seem to use the mechanism of salad spinners. The Sears WonderWash seems to be popular.
I was glad to see this because I had the same exact question, but then I realized that given this machine seems to be designed for manually loading the water into it, a dedicated "rinse cycle" probably wouldn't help much because it's probably easier to just manually rinse the clothes after.
This is very cool. Great that it’s built out of metal for longevity and repairability. Wonder if they could make the radius of the rotation smaller since that seems like the most likely ergonomic improvement I could see from the demo.
The THIRD sentence in the article explains that they ship to the US. You are tone-policing your hallucinated version of the article!
> Enter Navjot Sawhney, who founded the UK-based social enterprise The Washing Machine Project (TWMP) to tackle this, and has now shipped almost 500 of his hand-crank Divya machines to 13 countries, including Mexico, Ghana, Iraq *and the US.*
Can you give one example of someone you know or have heard of who could benefit from one of these as opposed to a really cheap rental grade 120vac modern washing machine? You’d have to not have electricity to need one of these and rural electrification was a thing over 100 years ago here.
I wouldn't be surprised if the US ones weren't mostly used by people with camp sites. Even the poorest people have elctricity. But affluent people have remote camps.
I love it. I used to work for a company targeting markets in the developing world. It's really easy to take for granted the supply chains that exist all around us. I always like to see the creative solutions people come up with when resources are constrained.
PS: As an example, note the sheet-metal construction. In an industrialized country we would laser-cut all these parts. If you wanted to make this in an area with less infrastructure you might use a template and carbide gas torch to cut out the large shapes, then a hand punch to make the screw holes. More labor intensive, but still doable.
In an "industrialized" country we encase the real drum in a glued tight unopenable plastic enclosure to prevent the drum seals from being service replaced when they fail so that what used to be a small low cost repair now results in a forced new machine purchase.
I could not find if the team makes design open
https://www.thewashingmachineproject.org/
That alone will be revolutionary.
I am interested in unit cost for mass production. It needs to be significantly cheaper than an old style top-loading washing machine to be affordable. The design of old style washing machine is mature and priced at around $100 for 8kg model. I suspect it can be stripped down further, remove water pump, remove program controlled inlet valve et al. to reduce the cost to below $50. Granted, washing machine like that needs electricity, but solar panel may be cheap enough.
One more thing, the water is not always easy to get in poor places. It is often much easier to carry laundry to a well, creak, or river than transport water to home. The path to the water sources may be a narrow trail often going up and down hills, so even with wheels on the machine, it is impractical to drag the machine to the water.
Extremely simple washing machines already exist, and I suspect on the order of 30-40 dollars. They are top-loading. No pumps. Turn one dial to let water in through the inlet. Turn another dial to let water out through the outlet valve. All manual, no pumps. Then flip switch to start spinning with electric motor, flip it back to stop spinning (no timers).
What you do is fill it with water. Add soap. Then put in first load of clothes and run it for 15 minutes. Then take out the clothes and put them in a tub. Repeat with second load of clothes in same soapy water. Once, all clothes are done, then put in fresh water. Run all loads through it to get the soap out. You are done.
(Relatively) richer people might have another machine that acts as a spinner. Otherwise, you just hang up the wet clothes outside.
> (no timers).
The automatic timer part is almost certainly the cheapest part of any washing machine.
Reminds me strongly of a program by Tim Hunkin from the 1980s: the Secret Life of the Washing Machine. Highly recommend.
https://youtu.be/SgWh-5DsiQM?si=ILozBq9QPSEHd1W2
Feel like replacing my piece of shit LG with this. It can only soak for a predetermined amount of time and if I try to pause it to soak longer it drains the water in 3 minutes. Plus, scrud!
My Mom had a washer that did this. I told her to unplug it to soak overnight. That worked, but she hated that thing, sold it, and took my sister's older washer that didn't have any "we know better than you do" features.
Many washers will pause if the lid is open.
Most washers outside of Asia are horizontal, not vertical, so there is no lid to open. And the ancient tech ones in North America that load from the top don't have any electronics and are already immune.
It sounds kind of sarcastic, yet that was actually the personal thought also. Really sounds like its comparable to the amount of work with modern machines anyways. Couple minutes of hand cranking, and otherwise, approximately the same. Owned a modern washing machine for years, and not sure if I've ever used almost any of the settings or features other than, "load clothing on default, push start".
Probably sell well in a lot of developed world markets for people who just want to limit their electricity use, live away from the grid, have less reliance on complicated electronics, or minimize money use in an expensive society.
A big difference is that this can't properly centrifuge your clothes, while a normal washing machine can. This also needs manually filling and emptying, while a normal washing machine handles all that, including multiple rinse cycles.
You should use the bedding setting for large quilts and blankets, and the towels setting for towels, it really does work better. Experiment with the other settings so you can see the difference in wash time, water levels, spin speed and then you know which one to choose based on what you want for that load.
Oh and separate your laundry. Don't throw towels, blankets, and clothes in all at the same time.
Why separate laundry? I've tried it in the past, but don't do it anymore. Same result. The stains that can be cleaned get cleaned. The stains that would persist, persist. The only difference is the temperature setting.
As for separating colors - in my life I've had a piece of clothing stain other clothes 2 or 3 times. Once I put some white shirts and they came out pink because of another red shirt. Funny thing is, the pink was very uniform, so it looked as if the shirts were originally pink.
If my washing machine breaks, I'll get a second hand one. If I get a brand new washing machine, it will have to have a manual mode where I can set the desired program manually. For example, what is "towel setting"? If I can't see and modify the setting (e.g., A temperature for B minutes at C RPM, then D temp for E min for F RPM, etc.), I wouldn't use it.
Colors don't bleed much these days. Some might, e.g. on handmade clothing such as tyedye but most commercial colors don't.
If you wash items of different weights, fabrics, etc. together the load can get unbalanced more easily. Such as as single heavy towel or jacket in with a bunch of light synthetic items.
The "towels" setting uses warmer water and faster spin speed but an overall shorter cycle (at least on my washer) compared to the "normal" cycle. This probably presumes that towels usually are made of cotton and aren't very dirty.
I agree that a fully manual mode would be nice. My washer (LG) doesn't have that but by knowing what the various cycles and optional settings (e.g. soil level, extra rinse) do you can get pretty close to what you want.
> Colors don't bleed much these days. Some might, e.g. on handmade clothing such as tyedye but most commercial colors don't.
Sadly, with fast fashion, we've regressed to the point places like Shein/Fashion Nova sell pool attire vs swim suit that is not meant to get wet due to the dyes not holding when wet.
> I agree that a fully manual mode would be nice.
Enter "why wifi on your washing machine makes sense"
Not needed. Pure software change, cycle programs aren't difficult, and there's plenty of buttons to use to input them.
Consider getting a European model..
I was always confused doing laundry in the US. Warm cycle or cold cycle?
I have 30C, 40C and 60C depending on what I'm washing. I probably have more programs, but never use them. For pillows and stuff I adjust spinning, from 1200 to 400 RPM. And I use special short, low rpm handwash program for wool.
(Side loaded ofcourse, that way the dryer can be on top)
> Consider getting a European model..
Top loader uselessness is my pet peeve.
Front loaders (just like one in video) wring clothes as they spin. The result difference is day and night.
Top loaders don’t have seals that can fail (and smell), and they also wrong clothes when they spin at the end. The clothes experience about 200g, the extra 1g isn’t a big difference.
It depends. My clothing doesn't (typically) need to tumble for long whereas towels might and bedding needs to go for much longer. In general it's probably better for fabric to be washed for less time if possible. It wears out.
Also if you pay close attention you'll notice that things don't come fully clean (old machines didn't either) just "clean enough". Throw some well used dog bedding in with your shirts and this fact might become more readily noticable. So it makes sense to wash like-use with like-use for that reason alone.
Less time != less wear. Some of the longest programs just let the laundry sit with occasional agitation, similar to how the machine in this article works, in the name of energy saving.
How much free time do you have to do this?
Wash.
Is clean?
Yes: put in drier.
No: GOTO wash.
You guys are delusional. Try serving even a small family with this, it's a nightmare. I can clearly see people romanticizing dull hard labour.
Check the user manual. The default program is usually not the most energy and water efficient one but rather the mandatory one for certifying the machine.
Same thing for dishwashers, the “eco” program is often not the best especially if you have an “auto” one.
As it's the one for certifying the machine, it usually is the most energy and water efficient one. For washing machines the downside is that it takes 3 hours (or longer, if the machine was built before the EU capped it to 3h), for dishwashers the downside is that it stops being efficient once you realize that you have to run it a second time to actually get clean dishes.
For my new Bosch Benchmark dishwasher, "normal" actually uses 2.4 gallons and 1.25 kwh a load, is most efficient, and is quietest. There is no "eco" mode. "Auto" mode uses about twice the gallons no matter what's inside and slightly more kwh.
Maybe it’s a European thing. The eco program is the one mandated by law and the one they use for the energy rating.
But for machines that have a table showing power and water use, it’s never the most efficient one (in all the ones I checked). There is always a better program, it’s usually called “auto”.
Maybe it’s different in North America, idk what the rules are there.
Seems like the companies think we're too dumb in North America. My machines didn't come with any sort of tables. Someone else was saying their washing machine has actual temperature settings and RPM settings. None of the ones I've seen here tell us that, not even in the manual.
I've heard this before (and I don't have any reason to doubt your research) but I'm struggling to figure out why it would be the case.
Regulation 1016/2010 (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2010/1016/oj/eng) is the thing that establishes the various requirements for home dishwashers. It's pretty straightforward (most of the content establishing how efficiency is calculated). It basically just requires the default program to be "suitable to clean normally soiled tableware and that it is the most efficient programme in terms of its combined energy and water consumption for that type of tableware".
I could imagine some issues with how these numbers are calculated that reward "less efficient" devices or something like that, but it's pretty hard to figure out what that could be. Bit of a mystery!
I try to explain this to people, but they are so convinced by the 'eco' branding/rethoric that even when you demonstrate they still disbelieve, or more acuratly do not want to believe.
Eco modes save water and generally take a little longer, albeit same temperature (ergo a little bit more energy). I am missing something?
Yes, check the power and water usage table in the manual: all the ones I’ve checked (in Europe), the eco program is not eco when compared to others (especially auto if it’s there)
Eco is just the standard program they have to ship and must use for the energy efficiency rating.
Why would they not use the most efficient one for the energy efficiency rating?
My favorite modern "efficiency" feature has to be the machine refusing to unlock the door for me after it's been "too long". Okay, fine. Reset cycle, add some random item, whoops there went a bunch of water and detergent. Not my problem I guess. Say goodbye to those EnergyStar figures.
Get a speed queen. Famous for being reliable because it’s a “dumb” machine (in a good way).
They are also very heavy duty compared to a normal washer and dryer, even a basic one. I've had mine since 2017 and they just work.
Destroys your clothes and is mega inefficient in exchange. You can buy better washers than LG washers that are modern.
Nah, maybe the TC-5 could be argued to be relatively inefficient and pretty aggressive on delicate stuff (and loud), but the TR-7 is both efficient and gentle on clothing while being quiet. Have had one for a while and love it. No machine is perfect but this feels pretty close.
The TC5 is fine by me. I've never had a washer that worked this well. The noise level is the last thing I'm worried about when a meaningful cycle completes within 30 minutes.
Does being "inefficient" really matter for a washing machine if you don't live in the desert? Its not like they go through 100+ of gallons of water or ridiculous amounts of electricity even in the worst possible case scenarios.
Actually old top loaders aren't so far off of that number. Maybe 40+ gallons per load.
But still I'm inclined to agree with the general sentiment of not micro optimizing things in ways that make people's lives more difficult.
It's only $1700! And would also last 30+ years, like a 1980s Maytag
At this point with having to read the manual to open the damned door I'm seriously thinking about attaching a belt drive, motor, driver circuit and esp32 running an http with spin/stop commands.
I was diagnosing my washer (drum balance issue; many annoying minutes unlocking the lid multiple times) earlier today and had the same thought.
What's old is new again. It's surprising to see how surprised people get about this sort of thing - as if we skipped straight from hand-washing to computerized washing machines. One generation of living with technology and we forget how to live without it.
> We went back to the drawing board and really listened to the people we were designing for, for the context in which they lived. That research changed everything,”
I understand they had a very good idea to begin with, and more importantly their heart in the right place And then further made it better with more input.
Reading the comments here the better solution for us is probably not to go back to "dumb" washing machines, but to regain control of how these machines are designed, for who and for what.
I'm thinking about Linux, which can be stripped down as small and nimble as needed to run a single board micro controller, or be large as needed to have everything to run an enterprise service. Being able to do the same with a washing machine would absolutely change their usefulness and place in our society.
I don't know how it could start, perhaps with an IKEA washing machine that actually needs assembly, for users to then tweak the parts, start comminities so we get at least in a KALLAX situation ?
https://ikeahackers.net/2025/07/ikea-kallax-hacks-2.html
This is not targeted for people on hackernewz
>It works like this: after loading the clothes, detergent and water, and letting it sit for 10-15 minutes, users can close the lid and turn the handle for two minutes, repeating this twice more after ten minutes of letting the clothes sit in between spins. And voila — the machine can then be drained using the tap at the front.
I lived off-grid and did all of our laundry, a family of four (including a baby in cloth diapers), by hand, even in the winter (below -20F).
You know what works as well? A wash tub and a stick. Or a bucket and plunger. Or a posser if you're really fancy. I used a 30 gallon garbage can and a hand-carved posser. In mild or hot climates you can just stomp on it.
Same principle: Draw water, add cleanser, agitate for a couple of minutes, let it soak, return at some time in the future, agitate again. Remove laundry and let drip dry while you draw fresh water (mangles and spinners speed this up and are more effective, but not necessary). Squeeze wet laundry at lowest point where water has gathered. Repeat entire process with clean water, then lay it out in the sun prioritizing any sides with stains.
The secret sauce of clean laundry isn't how you agitate the laundry. It's just time and chemistry.
Water access, cleansing agents, and patience are fundamentally more important than providing "revolutionary" contraptions. It's the same difference between teaching people about no-knead bread and giving them hand-cranked stand-mixers. One solves the need for intensive manual labor and the other doesn't, but introduces a new point of failure.
And even importing enzyme-containing detergent is unnecessary. Plant ash (a source of alkali) and aged urine (a source of ammonia) are all you need to create what's known as bucking lye which cleans just as effectively and uses byproducts that they themselves produce by default. Residual stains are removed via UV from sun drying.
There's absolutely no need to complicate this.
This is the sort of comment I was hoping to find. I have focused in this area - improving lives of the poorest as efficiently as possible - for a long time and my immediate thoughts about this washing machine was that it was overcomplicated and definitely far too expensive (for many reasons) to ever really make a difference. Though, that won't stop these folks from doing this and receiving donations for it into perpetuity.
So much is possible if you just look at how nature, in one way or another, can do the work for you. No knead bread (or, better, periodic stretch and folds over the course of a few hours) is a perfect example. Or making a composting toilet/latrine by just adding sawdust, ash etc. Or simple and cheap rocket stoves that burn the smoke. Or cover crops and cultivating soil structure and microbes. Etc
The key for what you shared (and, i suppose this machine) is how little agitation you actually need, and how there's plenty of ways to do it with no fancy equipment. Can you share more about your experience, or even share some links, about the amount of agitation needed, how "cleaning" actually works (you said time and chemistry - but how?), and how to make effective, low-cost detergents anywhere?
Thanks!
Your heart is in a better place than the NGO-contraption market, but what you also need to understand is that when you change a local optima in minimal ways, you also disrupt the rest of the local economy inadvertently.
Take the rocket stove as an example. It's an "improvement" over three stone and hearth fires, right? Less particulate in the air, less smoke, less ash, and more efficient use of fuel, all good things, right? Everyone has to work less to gather fuel, everyone's lungs are happier, and so on.
But not quite.
The rocket stove reduces ash yield, reducing one universally useful by-product. The rocket stove minimizes smoke production, so instead of creosote deposits on the walls acting as a general biocidal agent and lowering air humidity, there's now high humidity with exposed walls, an ideal climate for mold growth. Ever wonder why traditional pit-houses and earth-lodges rarely had issues with mold and damp and typically annually fumigated their entire homes with smoke? Or why women in some Northern and Eastern Europe peoples gave birth in saunas even prior to the advent of germ theory? The answer is smoke is useful, not only for creating relatively sterile environments, not only from molds, but also bugs.
Chronic smoke exposure imposes real respiratory costs, but traditional societies tolerated those costs because smoke simultaneously provided insect control, food preservation, fumigation, and moisture regulation. Interventions that remove smoke without deliberately replacing those functions often trade one health burden for several others. And the simplest way to achieve all of those functions is the same way humans have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years.
The rocket stove minimizes fuel use, so instead of heating and cooking, you just end up with cooking (and note that the rocket mass heater doesn't solve this problem, which is just banking heat rather than using it more efficiently). This separation "works" in hotter climates, but at that point, why are you cooking indoors to begin with? And again, the reduction in smoke makes insects (namely mosquitoes) much more likely to discern where breathing humans are and able to reach within biting distance.
Generally, traditional practices often encode systems-level knowledge that modern interventions ignore. Diffusion of traditional practices will generally be better than trying to invent a better mousetrap.
As far as cleaning goes, as in the saponification and misculation of fats, the gist is to treat a fat with an alkali with agitation and time. Heat speeds up the process (hot process), but enough time completes the reaction (cold process). Soap and detergents are just rapid versions of this process, but aren't at all necessary, so long as you have water and ash.
This understanding is called the sinner's circle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinner%27s_circle
It's the same reason when washing your hands you're "supposed to" sing happy birthday twice while agitating your hands. The soap is engaging in a chemical reaction with the fats on the your hands that takes more time because the human body can only tolerate so hot a temperature of water. You can use cold water and wait longer and have the same effect. The same thing is true of washing clothes, dishes, or whole bodies.
The Romans understood this. The baths were alkaline. They rubbed themselves with olive oil, used a stirgil (something like a frosting knife) to squeegee off the oil, then went in the pool. The alkali in the warm water combined with the residual olive oil and basically creates soap on your skin that is then rubbed off.
It's the same reason that Romans were able to have lily-white togas despite not having modern enzymatic cleaners and chlorine-based bleaches. They had lant and wood-ash alkali:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lant
In short, my experience is that I've improved my own life by observing what the time-rich resource-poor peoples of the world do rather than the inverse.
Had the feeling someone must have made a similar design in Japan. And yes:
https://youtu.be/iMOkxrdP6kY?si=HWf_Sb-zwk5Vi8ES
(sold for about 10,000 yens https://item.rakuten.co.jp/thanko/000000003846/)
The metal design in the article is still more flexible and durable. I also assumed the Japanese version would be targeted at disaster situations and/or remote mountain areas and be more repairable, but the cost saving part seems to be a major selling point.
I don't see an agitator, how does it get the clothes clean?
Tumbling, just like a generic front-load washing machine.
Gravity.
The clothes falling down from the upper half is described on the slides, so I assume the rotation isn't fast enough for the clothes to stick to the walls, or it has an elliptical rotor to make sure there a speed difference ?
(edited as I'm not sure how it exactly works)
Love seeing this.
For many reasons, I expect to see a lot of new products and solutions going against the main trends of locking down the user, planned obsolence, rent seeking from buyers, and limiting their choices.
Imagining a company shipping the home appliances equivalent to Frame.work laptops: open, reparable, hackable, and upgradable. I would happily connect them to my home wifi, program them the way I want, and have one hub that allows me to monitor health, upgrade firmware, control functionality.
Sadly arm strength and endurance is way worse than legs, this should obviously work with pedals like a bicycle. I would even be ready to buy one to replace my daily commute when working from home.
It is easy to understand the impact this will be in people’s lives.
I think within no time it will be modded with motors, maybe salvaged from broken electrical appliances and it will come full circle.
You’d need electricity for that and a lot of places don’t have it.
You'd be surprised at the places that have electricity, like houses in middle of nowhere, central asia. One of the challenges with engineering technology for the global south is that poverty is wildly different for different people. I met a professor working on flatpack windmills to pump water/electricity. The major challenges he kept seeing in the the Andes weren't the sorts of longevity/efficiency/logistics issues we usually solve with standard engineering, but how the products interacted with local politics and society.
To add to AlotOfReading's point, many places have some electricity, just utterly unreliable.
It might be down a few hours every day, or completely cut for days after storms or infra degradation, or the current fluctuate too much for delicate electronics. Many places could also get hold of a gasoline generator.
These kind of variations could require more thinking on the design, but being able to use electricity when available and hand power when needed would be the best.
Ideally the people on the ground thinking about their specific issues and having open ways to adapt the machine for it opens the door for many kind of evolutions.
Previously (2021): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168460
He started in 2018. In 2021 he had shipped 30 (to Iraq). Wanted to ship 7500 in the next 3 years. Fast foward to 2025: he has shipped 500 in 13 countries. Hopefully, with his partnerships and local production (in India) his ramp-up will fasten up. I wish him luck.
I really like the practicality and simplicity of this.
Designing stuff for real humans to use, is really difficult, and really humbling.
In my experience, defense contractors really have to take the user context into account. It can be life or death. I used to work for one, and seeing the stuff come back from the field, was a lesson in humility.
There are lots of little hand-crank washing machines on Alibaba and Amazon. Most are plastic and rather fragile looking. Many seem to use the mechanism of salad spinners. The Sears WonderWash seems to be popular.
Wait does it not need a rise as well to get the soap out of the clothes?
I was glad to see this because I had the same exact question, but then I realized that given this machine seems to be designed for manually loading the water into it, a dedicated "rinse cycle" probably wouldn't help much because it's probably easier to just manually rinse the clothes after.
I noticed that too. Does anyone know what happens if you don’t rinse the clothes?
This is very cool. Great that it’s built out of metal for longevity and repairability. Wonder if they could make the radius of the rotation smaller since that seems like the most likely ergonomic improvement I could see from the demo.
500 machines in 7 years? Seems questionable.
Checks all the boxes but why no TEDx talk?
what a great demo too. Feel like a lot of companies could learn from him!
Deleted cause I was wrong.
The THIRD sentence in the article explains that they ship to the US. You are tone-policing your hallucinated version of the article!
> Enter Navjot Sawhney, who founded the UK-based social enterprise The Washing Machine Project (TWMP) to tackle this, and has now shipped almost 500 of his hand-crank Divya machines to 13 countries, including Mexico, Ghana, Iraq *and the US.*
Can you give one example of someone you know or have heard of who could benefit from one of these as opposed to a really cheap rental grade 120vac modern washing machine? You’d have to not have electricity to need one of these and rural electrification was a thing over 100 years ago here.
Maybe some of the prepper crowd?
TFA states units have been shipped to the US.
I wouldn't be surprised if the US ones weren't mostly used by people with camp sites. Even the poorest people have elctricity. But affluent people have remote camps.
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But can it really clean clothes if it doesn’t have 802.11ac with AI spot cleaning and a 750mv iOS app??? /s
No, but if it has access to your contacts it can.