Slow tumbling and/or quick washes
All the (more energy- and water-efficient) washers I've had in the past 8 years have employed slow tumbling at the beginning of the cycle in order to soak the clothes down; the AEG and Bosch machines just tumbled slowly backwards and forwards topping up as it goes - and the Beko which was in this flat would tumble slow, and interrupted tumbling to top up resuming again once it reached the level. My current Miele will do slow tumbles backwards and forwards as usual, but when it adds water it will tumble the clothes even slower, and the slow tumbling will be continuous lasting as long as however long it takes to top up the water level. It also uses slower tumbling in the rinse cycles, the theory being that a) it creates less suds, b) the load is saturated and drenched by water more both via the physical pool of water and the showering system from the paddles, and hence c) less water is needed for the rinse cycle - similar to the system Alex describes earlier.
The Quick wash on mine is one of the best 30 minute cycles I have used. A 12 min wash at cold-40<sup>o</sup>C user selectable, spin bursts after the wash, 2 rinses with spin bursts in between in 10 minutes, and in 8 minutes drain, burst, and full 1600rpm spin. Select water plus, you get a deeper wash and rinse level - ideal for cheating and putting more than half a load in on a Quick wash - as well as an extra rinse, giving a 37 minute Quick wash - only brand I can think of with a similar quick wash are the Asko machines which offer huge flexibility when it comes to cycle times (I think I'm right in thinking it will let you choose a temp up to 95 even on the fast cycles). A stark contrast to the Refresh cycle on the AEG - 20 minutes advertised. The Refresh cycle filled to delicates level, heated to 30, drains and rinses twice without spinning, and a run up to 1200 at the end maintaining the speed for 10 seconds or so. Two major flaws which made the cycle not so quick - first, because of the mass of water it just could not heat up quick enough and therefore the timer would often stick on 12 minutes for ages before it got to temperature, and because of the very short spin you had to run a seperate 12 minute spin cycle afterwards - by the time you'd gone through this process, you could have just used the Time Saver button which would give a 40*C standard cottons wash with interim rinses and a full spin in 55 minutes and only be 15 minutes behind what it would have taken you to run a similar load on Refresh by the time you had spun the load again
I often found myself using the Intensive 40 and Intensive 60 cycle on the Beko that was in this flat when we moved in, simply because they were more generous with water and did an extra rinse - and they did perform extremely well although you had to wait two and a half hours. You really could not fit a standard 5kg load (that would fit in any other 5kg machine) in on the standard 40/60 cycle if you didn't want dry patches in the load. If the pressure sensor at least on the model we had (WM5120) was slightly more forgiving, the cycling would have made it quite a good machine indeed - everything else I couldn't fault about it, decent rinse & spin patterns, just the water levels that let it down.
Jon
