Chinese designers come up with exercise bike that washes your clothes as you pedal

bdsl wrote:

There's a very good reason most of us don't already have these. Washing machines use upwards of 500w of power. Even Wiggins said he averaged 'only' 476 watts in a 10 mile TT.

I'm guessing this doesn't actually exist, and the designers just drew a picture and wrote a press release.

Across much of Asia there's a trend towards much, much smaller washing machines, device less than third of the size of typical white goods. In Korea for example a chunk of the market is made up of young professionals who live in tiny apartments, and they prefer to do a small wash everyday.

bdsl wrote:

There's a very good reason most of us don't already have these. Washing machines use upwards of 500w of power. Even Wiggins said he averaged 'only' 476 watts in a 10 mile TT.

I'm guessing this doesn't actually exist, and the designers just drew a picture and wrote a press release.

Across much of Asia there's a trend towards much, much smaller washing machines, device less than third of the size of typical white goods. In Korea for example a chunk of the market is made up of young professionals who live in tiny apartments, and they prefer to do a small wash everyday.

bdsl wrote:

There's a very good reason most of us don't already have these. Washing machines use upwards of 500w of power. Even Wiggins said he averaged 'only' 476 watts in a 10 mile TT.

I'm guessing this doesn't actually exist, and the designers just drew a picture and wrote a press release.

When I lived in South Africa, I used one of these exclusively for years:
https://youtu.be/bvnXkT_ttWU

It's hand cranked and works well. I'm fairly certain it didn't need 500W to turn it, althou I could be stronger than I think I would imagine that most of that power goes into getting the large, counterbalanced drum going and then running the spin cycle.

bdsl wrote:

There's a very good reason most of us don't already have these. Washing machines use upwards of 500w of power. Even Wiggins said he averaged 'only' 476 watts in a 10 mile TT.

I'm guessing this doesn't actually exist, and the designers just drew a picture and wrote a press release.

The clue is that the machine stores electricity, presumably in a battery, to be used when 'you're too tired'. Presumably this means that you don't have to produce the wattage required at the time it's running, so you don't have to be turning out 500w or 400w or whatever yourself, it could be stored at an inconsistent rate from 1 to whatever wattage you can produce, then released at the consistent rate required to run the machine.

Nowhere near enough information in the article. What about cost? How much plumbing? When and where available?