We have a touring caravan and wondered about 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, so 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 the bed and shower and it’s 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 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
- You have to manually rinse at least twice. I use a jug when emptying to aid the speed of the drain hose
- 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 have ours for convenience and a linen basket and not to save money. Now that we have one, although we don’t use it very often, we wouldn’t be without it.