Top-load washers: what 89 certified models measure

What this page measures#

Every number below comes from fw_models certified registries: 89 catalogued top-load washers from 11 brands.

A certified-product listing is a manufacturer filing, so this is a census of what is CERTIFIED — not of what is on sale, not of what is installed, and not of every brand on the market. Read each row as "of the 89 top-load washers in this corpus", never as "of all top-load washers". Each row states its own count, because not every listing fills in every field. Method: /methodology.

The short answer for top-load washers#

The 89 top-load washers catalogued here come from just 11 brands, the narrowest brand spread of any cut measured on this site, and all 89 state every spec in the table. The middle listing holds 5 cubic feet against a range of 3.2 to 6, and annual water use runs from 4,072 to 7,636 gallons a year around a median of 5,975. The two efficiency rows behave unusually and it is worth saying plainly: the integrated modified energy factor runs 2.06 to 2.76 but its median is 2.06 — the same as its lowest value — and the integrated water factor runs 3.2 to 4.3 with a median of 4.3, the same as its highest. When a median lands exactly on an endpoint, at least half the listings hold that one value, so these are not smooth spreads but clusters sitting on a small number of repeated figures.

How top-load washers measure#

Lowest, middle and highest value stated by the top-load washers in this corpus. The middle value is a median, so a real listing holds it.

Every row above is a claim about one corpus — fw_models certified registries: 89 catalogued top-load washers from 11 brands (a certified-product census is not a census of units in service, and not every brand on the market is certified). Not every listing fills in every field, so the "Models stating it" and "Brands" columns are that ROW's own denominators: they count the models that state THAT spec, never the corpus total. Method: /methodology.

How to use these numbers#

That clustering is the most informative thing in the table, and it changes how the efficiency rows should be read. A median equal to the minimum means the bottom value is not an outlier but the common case: more than half of these 89 listings state an integrated modified energy factor of 2.06, and the 2.76 at the top is the exception. The water factor is the mirror image — most listings sit at 4.3, the least efficient end of its range, with 3.2 the exception. Neither row is a gentle distribution you can pick a middle out of; each is a pile at one end with a short tail. In practice that means a top-load listing's efficiency figure carries less discriminating power than the range alone suggests, and a machine stating the better value is doing something the majority of this catalogue does not.

Capacity behaves normally by comparison. A median of 5 cubic feet against a range of 3.2 to 6 is a real spread, and the median is a genuine listing's value rather than an average, so five cubic feet is an ordinary machine here. What the table cannot tell you is the shape of that space — a top-loader with an agitator and one without can state the same volume while holding a visibly different load, and this corpus records the number without recording the configuration.

Water use is the row to read as a total rather than a rate. The annual figure assumes a standard number of cycles a year, so it describes a test protocol and not your laundry; the water factor beside it is the per-cycle, per-cubic-foot rate that compares a large drum fairly against a small one. Use the factor for the comparison and the annual figure for the budget.