We have a touring caravan, regularly travelling abroad, and wondered about having a portable washing machine for the convenience of washing small loads on board and if we were without laundry facilities. A twin tub was out of the question for us as it would require too much space that we don’t have and would also be too heavy. We decided on a single tub and found a second hand one reasonably priced at £20, well worth a punt we thought. We found all the single tubs to be essentially a bucket with an agitator and couldn’t see any difference between brands.
It has two switches; the one on the left is ‘wash’ or ‘spin’ and the one on the right is a timer up to 15 minutes, which of course you can repeat as often as you like.
Our single tub PWM sits perfectly in a space between our fixed bed and shower and it’s conveniently used as a laundry basket in between wash loads. We use campsite machines for full loads and find the PWM useful for smaller loads and especially whites, as we never seem to accumulate enough to warrant a full white load. We fill the unit from the shower and also drain it into the shower tray which works well, especially on a fully serviced site.
The downsides are:
- It’s on the floor and low level, so a bit back breaking
- The washing has a tendency to tangle
- It is not big enough for large towels or bedding
- You have to manually rinse at least twice. I use a jug when emptying the PWM to aid the speed of the drain hose
- A campsite might have laundry sinks, but often the water flow is restricted and rinsing takes too long. However, when the campsite has good water supply, it’s easy and brilliant to rinse a load after the wash
- We left the spin basket at home as it’s too small and inefficient to be of value. The washing has to be hand rung to put it on the line, and without a decent spin dryer the wash load will take longer to dry.
To sum up, we did not buy one to save money, we have ours for convenience and it doubles up nicely as a linen basket. Now that we have one, although we don’t use it quite weekly, we wouldn’t be without it.