How come washing machines in the UK are different to the ones in America?

Question

In the UK, we put our clothes in from the side, and i'm sure that in America they put their clothes in on top... Is there a particular reason for this? And also, are they different in every country?

Strange question... but ive always wanted to know!

Answer 1

because Americans are idiots  

Answer 2

~~It sounds like we have the same things actually. We have top loaders as well as front loaders. Front loaders are much more energy efficient. We here in the US may have been slower for the opportunity to buy these, but as soon as they were available I got them. I think they are much more popular as energy efficiency is what everyone wants. I've been using a front load machine for over ten years.~~

Answer 3

hi Phoebe, It's the same here in France we have top loading machines as well, the difference is they are a lot slimmer as the drum is turned on it's side and not face on (if you know what i mean) clothes are loaded in at the top and the drum has a door with a clip that you clip together once you've put your clothes in, the powder also goes into a hatch on the lid before you put the lid down and it locks into place and you cannot see the clothes being washed as there's no window. they are great machines and can be used in the smallest places like a small bathroom as lots of French kitchens are 'American' style and there isn't enough room for a big machine.

Answer 4

You get top loaders here too - it's just the convention for most people to want to build appliances in to the kitchen or laundry room.

Answer 5

because they are a different country.

Answer 6

One reason is also that the US toploaders use more water and power.  That is not considered important by many american buyers, who are happy to have a thirsty power hunmgry appliance that does a load in 30 minutes.  Here people are less extravagant whether oin the launbdry room or on the road.  It may be that more efficient machine become popular in the US as the power/energy costs rise.

Answer 7

The American Top-loaders wash in a different way to the standard UK front loader or the more continental drum action (slimline) toploader that other contribuitors have mentioned.

The American Toploader is a big tub with a central agitator. It washes by filling the tub (using a lot more water than front loaders) and then agitates the water. It practically beats the fabric and so the wash is actually completed very fast. Downside is there is more wear on your clothes , you use a lot of water and therefore more detergent. But these are very good if you have a lot of children and need to wash a lot as the children invariably grow out of the clothes before the extra wear is noticeable and you can complete a wash within 18min!!

The front loaders (& continental top-loaders) operate in a different way. These work with a drum that has paddles on the side of the drum. The clothes are placed in the drum (but not filled to the top this is where most folk go wrong!) and the fabric is saturated with washing solution of water and detergent, when the drum rotates the paddles lift the clothes up to the top when they fall to the bottom of the drum. This is the agitation that removes the dirt hence a packed machine will not wash well. The machine varies the water level in the drum depending on the fabric - delicate cycles use a higher water level so the fall from the top of the drum to the water level is much less and so less agitation. Much kinder on fabrics and uses much less detergent but take a lot longer. There are other differences that effect how they wash such as American top loading machines  take in hot & cold water and don't have an internal heater, whilst UK machines used to hot & cold fill but topped up the temperature with the internal heater (but these are now less available) whilst continental machines tended to be just cold fill and just heat up the water required by the internal heater. This actually gives a better wash by taking advantage of the bio action of biological detergents by starting cold and gradually heating up. This does take a bit longer though.

The reason why each country has a slightly different method is how clothes washing evolved in each country.

Basic hand washing meant submerging the clothes completely in a detergent & water solution, agitating to loosen the dirty then rinsing until all trace soap/detergent had gone. The agitation could be by hand or use of a posser to push the solution through the clothes or use of a scrubbing board (or brush) and a bar of soap. The use of heat by boiling also helped remove the dirt (hence the old wash houses with a copper in the corner that you would light the fire under). In the UK Burco brought out an electric boiler that revolutionised clothes washing, as they developed the Burco boiler they introduced a mechanical agitator aswell. However you still needed hand wring or pass through a wringer (mangle) to remove the water before rinsing and after rinsing. As a result "single tub" machines were developed where a mechanical wringer was incorporated on the top of the tub with an agitator in the tub. Many brands were making these machines, some with a heater some without. The next evolution was the spinner. A perforated drum rotated at high speed was very effectively remove water from the clothes, this replaced the wringer. The twin tub was born with the washer on one side and the spinner on the other. In the Uk Hotpoint continued with the agitator in the middle whereas Hoover developed a disc that was at the side of the tub under the water that spun resulting in the clothes moving in the water in a roll over motion. Up to now washing still involved a lot of manual involvement. Then the tub was combined with the spinner as one, where the tub itself becomes the spinner when needed. This is where the American top-loading machines have stayed whilst in the UK the only one that really held a market share like this was made by hotpoint even though this was now "automatic" the twin tubs kept their popularity instead.  In the UK "automatic" only really became popular when the tub was put on the side in the form of a drum and the agitator replaced by the paddles on the side of the drum - a front loading automatic.The reason was probably because the spin speed of a front loader has usually been greater than the top loader automatic and with traditionally drying clothes outside in the UK with our unpredictable weather an automatic machine really needed to have a half decent spin to prise the British housewife from her twin tub with a very powerful spinner. In America they did not have such an issue. Likewise the size of the machine was not an issue in the USA, whereas front loaders fit better in our British homes whilst other countries needed even more compact machines and so the top loading drum machines were created.

Answer 8

You can buy front load washing machines in the USA too.  They are more efficient in that they use less water, so that may be why they are more prevalent in the UK.  I don't know what your water supply issues are there.

I lived in Kuwait for a while, and most of the washing machines there were front load, although there were several brands of top load machines too.

The nice thing about top load washing machines is that if you forgot a sock or something, you can add it after the wash cycle has started.  Once you start a front loader, you cannot add anything.

Answer 9

The reason is because in the UK flats(places people live) are a lot smaller and they just don't have the room. You would have to cut your regular clothes load into thirds because they are so small and most people just have a washer and dry their clothes outside.