Panasonic NA-140VX4 review

If you’ve got a large family or regularly have bucket-loads of laundry, a washing machine with a 10kg drum could be the perfect fit. It lets you tackle all of your laundry (or larger items) in one wash, saving you both time and money. That’s the theory here with the Panasonic NA-140VX, which uses cutting-edge technologies to help save energy and water to reduce running costs.

Its 10kg drum, means you can wash huge loads or individual items with the NA-140VX4

POWER AND WATER USAGE

A washing machine can seem like good value on the surface, but when you take into account the costs to run it, quite often this can hit your wallet hard. That’s why we test every machine for the amount of power and water it uses, calculating the costs in real terms so you’ll know exactly how much it will cost you in the long run.

We always begin our tests with a 30C wash cycle using our 3kg test load of mixed washing. In this cycle the NA-140VX4 used 48L of water and a low 0.36kW of power. That gave us a cost per cycle of just 19p, which is competitive, particularly for such a big machine. Running at its default spin speed of 1,200rpm, we found that water retention in our clothes was just 1.1kg.

Keeping the same programme, but upping the temperature to 40C, we found that water consumption stayed similar (50L), but power consumption jumped to 0.6kW. This meant that the cost per cycle increased to 23p, which is extremely competitive and one of the lowest costs we’ve seen at this temperature. Again, the washing picked a 1,200rpm spin speed, so our clothes came out retaining 1.1kg of water.

Synthetics 40C was our next test cycle. This used just 46L of water and kept power down, using 0.5kW. This gave us an extremely competitive cost per cycle of 20p. Spin speed was again 1,200rpm, but this time the clothes retained 1.4kg of water.

Whenever a machine offers an energy-saving cycle, we always test that too. The NA-140VX4 here offers a 15C cycle, so we ran our load on it to see how it fared. The cost per cycle was just 13p, with power usage incredibly low at 0.14kW and water usage at just 39L. Again, the spin speed of 1,200rpm left 1.1kg water in the finished cycle. Another great performance, and the cheapest Eco setting we’ve seen to date.

This low running costs are largely down the efficient way that the machine measures the load, using just the required amount of water and power for that particular load.

We also calculated running costs based on the EU Energy Label (see how we test washing machines for more information). Using our calculations we worked out that this machine costs £44.83 for high usage, £33.62 for medium usage and £22.42 for low usage. These costs include water, waste water and electricity based on the UK average. We were very impressed with these figures from a machine with such a big drum.