*************Water use is an issue for me because 1) It uses energy to pump it up from the well. 2) I don't like dirtying and drawing up more water than I need.****************

As to #1. I think that so long as you have a full size machine you are stuck with the amount of water it was designed to use.
There are small "apartment" sized machines that work well and use very little water. But then there is the cost to purchase one.

As to #2 Well It all comes out in the wash. Only in this case the washing is done by nature. The soil will clean the water. It does it for all the animals that excrete on the surface. After dirty water passes through a certain amount of soil and experiences a certain amount of biological activity it is cleansed as pure as you please and is returned to the aquifers.

This is not the case for water that is contaminated with VOCs, and other things like PCPs etc. They don't come out in the soil so well.
Those things need time to decompose. Usually the time needed is longer than the time it'll take to return to the aquifer.

**********The small setting is very large on our old machine, and we do plenty of bucket washing and shower washing of clothing, but sometimes it gets old.*************

I can guess that it might.

********** What I was asking for was if there was a simple way to trick the sensor. Thank you, Cliff, for explaining how that might be done, and for warning that it's complicated and may fail.************

Sorry I couldn't drive the nail home for ya.
As an aside why not grab a junked washer and experiment on that ? There's lots of machines that work fine but were not so snazzy as the New Bosch or Melie that replaced it. So they got junked. That's what happened to my last machine,. I got a snazzy new one and tossed the old. I forget which broke the dryer or washer. I bet it was the dryer, they break more often.

That way you don't risk the machine you have.


*************We're working on making a pedal-powered machine, but that will be a while now that all the garden projects have taken over.***************

That's adventurous. Do post pics when you get it up and pedaling.

Water is still too cheap for people to take misusing it seriously.
Similar to the price of gasoline,---
when market forces drive up the price of fresh water then people will all of a sudden get real smart and economical about how to use water right.

Meantime, in places like India & China, the drink-water wells get closer and closer to the shitholes. Long-term effect is mutative growth of entirely new and higher levels of cultural resistance to pathogens.

Cliff wrote:
>"*****************Most of that water is not taken from Aquifers as well. It is taken from Snow melt in the Rockys. That melt runs down the hill and into tributaries and eventually into the Colorado.***************

So the evil predators are stealing all that snow melt from the little itty bitty aneemules. I'm surprised that isn't a cause du jure among the crazies too."<

In some ways it is. The biggest problem and biggest waste of water in the Rockies is the cattle industry. Their use of water even when compared to the waste we see here in Vegas makes the Bellagio Fountain look like a little kid playing with a hose in the yard. Water rights are and have been fought over for over a century, sometimes in court other times with a rifle. Much of the reason the Colorado no longer reaches the Sea of Cortez is the beef on American tables. I hold little hope that the eating habits of Americans are going to change to crops far more compatible with the high plains any time soon, though bison to my tastes is far superior to beef and is evolved to deal with a limited water supply as you find in those high plain areas. Rather than worry about a couple more gallons in your washing machine change of diet makes a bigger difference.

For Cali, the idea of growing tomatos in the desert, again huge waste of water compared to household consumption. You wanna save water. Buy local and seasonal. You may not have tomatos for your cheeseburger in December, and you may actually have to eat a turnip but the water savings on a global level is significantly more. This is a case where the system is broken and people are delusional about where the waste really is not to mention the pollution levels of the ground, surface and collective levels. Sure water doesn't go anywhere, unless we start a hydrogen economy, but we are really good at rendering it unusable.

JSin