The top loaders I have seen here in Sweden have just been front loaders except the instead of having a window you load the drum through a hatch in the rim. That design should use exactly as much water as front loaders.
He probably just looked at a European-style top loader. My family here in Sweden had one of those over 30 years ago, and it is just a window-less front loader which you load through a hatch in the rim of the drum. It is a bit more of a hassle to unload them but they use virtually the same amount of water as front loaders.
I still buy top loaders, because they cost 2/3 of what the front-loaders do. Less, if you buy a dented or scratched one. They do indeed use more water, but I make up for that by not running partial loads.
I was confused by this and the sibling comment, but apparently "top-loader" in the US sense means a type where the drum's spin axis is vertical – which I didn't even know existed before this thread. "Top-loader" around here (Northern Europe at least) means a design where the spin axis is horizontal but you load and unload the machine from the top, via a hatch on the side of the drum. Because the drum is oriented the same way as in a front-loader, water usage should be equal.
I'd like to see how that's measured, and how it compares to real life usage. Our house came with a high efficiency top loader, but it constantly goes unbalanced if not really carefully loaded (and sometimes even then). Its solution is to try and rebalance itself by filling the drum up with water and agitating, up to three times before quitting with a warning.
> Top loaders [...] generally fill all the way up.
I have a top loader (a Whirlpool from 2011) and it most definitely doesn't fill "all the way up". It uses as little water as a modern front loader and also adjusts the water level based on fill level.
Without going into specifics of engineering and material advances, my instinct would be to buy the thing where if something went wrong with a seal or a closure, the water would remain contained. Side loaders assume by nature that nothing will go so wrong that everything fails and water leaks out the front.
If I was purchasing for harsh conditions and intermittent supply with standard Earth gravity, I, too, would choose top loaders.
Uh, no, a top-loader should certainly lock while it's running. When that thing spins to drain all of the water out, it moves dangerously fast. You should double check that there's not something wrong with it.
Also, after growing up with a top-loader, and having a front-loader at my current apartment, I'm amazed at how much water is used and wasted by a top-loader. It's like filling a damn bathtub.
Not to mention, they both don't need to be as heavy, and are more mechanically stable than trying to balance a heavy water load effectively from the sides.
you are right. The thing that is interesting is that pumping loads overall take a lot of the grid's energy, it's just that most pumps are refrigeration loads, not water transport.
I've seen some people talk about adding a heavy weight on top of the water in a pumped hydro system - something like a big concrete lid on top of a cylinder type reservoir.
Thanks for the link and apologies for the skepticism. I didn't know we had systems that basically slosh water from upper to lower during high demand and lower to upper during low demand to even out capacity.
A lot of roadworks takes place well away from a convenient source of water like a hydrant so the water has to be transported out there for the water filled barriers. So there's some savings since you don't have to take the whole weight back to storage and the distance the bulk of the weight travels is probably lower.
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