How many are running?

[retro-man]

I have always had a weird mind on things I think about. Anyway this has been on my mind for many years. How many washers, dryers, dishwashers are running at any given time in the world? Not including commercial units such as hotels, hospitals etc, but home units and like college dorms, apt complexs etc. Any guestimates. Anybody else come across numbers on this? Thanks
Jon

 

[dj-gabriele]

I'm thinking about the situation in Italy but you can expand it to any given country knowing only a few simple details:

I'm assuming a population of 60 million and 20 million families.
The averange family has a washing machine and could be doing something like 10 washes per week.
The averange duration of a wash is 90 minutes (cotton 2h and delicates 1h, equally distribuited)
That is 900 minutes of running time per week: that is around 9% of the time that the washer is running.
Assume that no washer runs between 0:00 and 5:00 so that leaves 19 hours per day that one can run a washing machine.
This gives a 11,3% of averange running time per "day".
You can assume that any given moment the 11,3% of washers are running (if you think that during the 19 hours people distribute their washing equally).
These figures give the number of 2.260.000 washing machine running at the same time in Italy only.

Same goes for dishwashers except that on averange only 2/3 of the families have one and they usually run them less often because they're tought to be more expensive than hand washing by many...

 

[retro-man]

Amazing and thats just one country. I can't then imagine what the total numbers would be. I guess detergent manufacturers stock would be a good investment. Thanks for the info and stats.
Jon