50, 000 pounds in weight, 79 feet in length, a million dollars in price, and shoots out 250 pounds of laundry every 2 &1/2 minutes.

How can that--the 250 in 2&1/2 minutes --be possible? Who either knows or can figure out how this behemoth works? All I can come up with is that after it's loaded with many thousands of pounds of laundry, and time has passed, then the loads come out that fast.

Or is this an assembly line of wash/rinse/spin operations and the 250 pound load passes through 79 feet of washing magic in 2 minutes and 33 seconds?

Someone will have the answer.

Talk about a forbidden cycle. YIKES!

The machine works as a modified front loader.  The cylinders are all connected and they rock back and forth as one.  When it is time to move the load into the next compartment, the cylinders do a complete revolution.  When the load is burped out of the other end, it usually slides directly into a hydralic press or a centrifugal extractor.  From there the load is turned out onto a conveyor that shuttles them to the dryers.

If you measure the time the first load goes in until the last load comes out and divide by the number of pounds cleaned, you get how many pounds are cleaned each minute.

Here comes the presser. WOW!!! The water is flattened out. I'm amazed.

That reverse scooping to shift the load reminds me of something right out of "War of the Worlds." In spinning washers, the clothes get pretty much glued together, especially in a unimatic, and because the pressing is so brief, I'm thinking this method maybe no more worse for wear on the fabrics.

Got a kick out of the drain in Mike's vid, a simple brass elbow among all that high technology. Who woulda thunk?

When I was a kid, the only laundry book at the local library was an industrial laundry tome showing pics of how each machine drained into the next, so there was a constant recycling of water of from very used to sparking fresh, a lot like what's going on here. In that book they called the water "washing liquors," a term which has stayed with me ever since.

This is amazing, fascinating stuff--suds-savers forever! Thank you all so much for the industrial tutorial.