Residential-style commercial clothes washers are designed for use in applications in which the occupants of more than one household will be using the clothes washer, such as multifamily housing common areas and coin laundries.
They typically feature a coin box or debit card reader and have fewer rinse options, fewer cycle options, and shorter cycle times than residential clothes washers. Tub capacity is no greater than 3.5 ft3 for horizontal-axis clothes washers and no greater than 4.0 ft3 for vertical-axis clothes washers.
Tips for considering or choosing a front-load washer:
- Front-load washers use less water, making them energy efficient and environmentally friendly
- Front-loading models are more accessible to wheelchair users
- Stacked units usually occupy less than 33 square inches of floor space and may be more accessible to people who
Energy Star Washers:
- Use less energy. One the average, a new ENERGY STAR certified clothes washer uses 270 KWh of electricity and costs $85 to run, each year.
- Use less water. A full-sized ENERGY STAR certified clothes washer uses 15 gallons of water per load, compared to the 23 gallons used by a standard machine. Over the machine's lifetime, that's a savings of 27,000 gallons of water!!
- Is your washer over 10 years old? It's estimated that there are 76 million top-loading washers with agitators, 25 million of which are at least 10 years old, still in use across the country. Washers manufactured before 1998 are significantly less efficient than newer models. Together, these inefficient washers cost consumers $2.8 billion each year in energy and water.
If every clothes washer purchased in the U.S. this year earned the ENERGY STAR, we would save 540 million kWh of electricity, 20 billion gallons of water, and 1.4 trillion BTUs of natural gas every year, resulting in energy bill savings of about $250 million, every year. (Source: http://www.energystar.gov/products/certified-products/detail/clothes-washers)