Appliance Standards Awareness Project Alliance for Water Efficiency

DOE published two final rules in 2020 that established separate product classes for dishwashers with a cycle time on the “normal cycle” of 60 minutes or less; top-loading clothes washers and certain clothes dryers1 with a cycle time of less than 30 minutes; and front-loading clothes washers with a cycle time of less than 45 minutes. [...] For example, DOE’s test data on clothes washers and clothes dryers published in August 2020 showed that three top-loading clothes washer models in DOE’s test sample had average cycle times on the “normal” cycle of 29, 27, and 27 minutes, respectively, and one front-loading clothes washer had a cycle time of 45 minutes.2 For clothes dryers, there were electric and gas models in DOE’s test sample wi. [...] For clothes washers, DOE’s testing in support of the analysis for the recent direct final rule (DFR) found no discernable relationship between efficiency and cycle time.10 Furthermore, the ranges of cycle times for models meeting the standard levels adopted for both top-loading and front-loading washers are no higher than for units at lower efficiency levels. [...] For example, DOE’s dishwasher test data show that short cycles with a cycle time of less than 60 minutes provide worse cleaning performance than the “normal” cycles on the same machines, in particular for “heavy” and “medium” soil loads.34 Specifically, DOE found that the average per-cycle cleaning index for the dishwashers in their test sample with the “heavy” soil load was 63.1 on the “normal” c. [...] As DOE described in the recent DFR for clothes washers, the average number of clothes washer cycles per year declined from 292 in the 2005 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) to 210 in the 2020 RECS.38 Similarly, in the recent 32 88 Fed.