EDIT: I've been told that this question is a rant, so here is a TL;DR:
I want to program my washing machine in the low-level sense, e.g. I want to set all the parameters of the washing cycle (amount of water, temperature, intensity of tumbling, duration of the cycle). Do you know any product on the market that allows this?
Longer version:
For the past 4 years, after the birth of our child me and my wife gave up on our Candy washing machine, since we got the impression it was made to punish us, not to help us. (we used disposable diapers, so diapers are not an issue, everything else is). The arrival of the child was only the latest straw, we were generally unhappy with washing machines for 10 years before.
More specific:
- they wash for too long. I am sorry, but don't have 4 hours to wash 4 kilos of laundry
- too little water (which may be connected to the previous one). I am horrified that the machine is savagely beating the laundry in a small puddle of putrid water. Science of washing or not, I don't want my clothes to be washed and destroyed that way. It does cause the textile to wear out more quickly and I am angry about this.
- "punishment" mentality of the washing program. Adding more water (yes there is button for that) increases cycle time up to a 20 minuts. It is almost as the designers would want me to suffer for using more water.
So right now, and for the past 4 years, we are making bi-weekly trips to the public laundry (with 40kg+ of laundry), where Speed Queen machines wash the laundry in 40 minutes, and they do it with plenty of water. My Candy washing machine is mainly not used. I live in EU, so laundromats are not nearly as ubiquitous as in US, so "trip" means the trip across the town, not down the block.
I was talking to other uses of the laundry about this and the feeling is frequent among people using these public laundries - most of them have washing machines at home, but they just gave up. Many people that don't use public laundries are angry about this as well, but there seem to be no other choice for the home appliances.
Also note that I am an engineer by trade (I know math) and I pretty much understand that any savings in water and electricity machine makes by torturing our laundry are totally nonsensically small in relation to overall use of water/electricity in the household (more water per day is used to flush my urine down the toilet than during one washing cycle).
So I explicitly don't care about energy efficiency labels. I would gladly buy an "E" or "F" based one, if it would behave more reasonably.
So my question is: short of buying one of the industrial/laundromat beasts made by SpeedQueen, is there ANY machine of the market which would allow me to set up MY program. I don't meean "fully programmable" machines sold by Samsung which have wifi, and bluetooth and whatnot... I don't need to know when the machine is done, I want to be done quickly. Not need to be 40 minutes, but the laundry should be done in one hour, and SpeedQueen machines indeed show that this is possible.
I would like to set duration of the cycle (in minutes), amount of water used for washing and rinsing, temperature of the water for washing and rinsing, intensity (speed and frequency) of tumbling and so on. Fine grained control which would allow me to optimize my cycle the way I like.
I am flabbergasted that basically in any industry the companies are struggling to please the customers, but in home appliance business that focus has been lost. My grandmother in 80ties had a washing machine that needed 2 hours to wash the laundry. Now I have to suffer 4 hours? Really?
EDIT2: I found the commercial machine on the Alibaba, that advertises exactly this functionality. It seems to be the closest what is available right now:
The smallest one they sell is for 15 kg loads. Provides USB port for PC programming.