Single appliance solar system?

Hello solar gurus!

I don't have a dryer, where I live it's sunny 300 days a year! so I use a solar dyer AKA, a clothesline. I've often thought that since I only wash clothes when the sun is shining, it'd be cool to have a little solar system just for my washing machine.
Is that possible? I've seen little camping or RV package systems have come down to a price I can afford. Obviously, I know I can't just plug my standard-issue whirlpool washer into a solar panel. I'll need to convert from DC to AC (or my washer in reaching the end of its life, can my next washer be DC?) and this question---Can a solar panel make enough to run a washing machine while it's running, or is a battery a necessity?  and finally--how do I find out how much electricity my washing machine needs to get all the way through one load a day?

Possibly the least complicated way to do this would be with a "solar generator" (SG) device, where you plug in an appliance, and the SG device is recharged by solar panel (or AC power, if necessary). No engineering decision required on your part, only a sizing exercise, where any solar generator company has loads of info about this on their web pages, or you can call in and talk to somebody.

These are all-in-one systems, so no guesswork on your part, like buying individual solar components and stringing them together correctly. Buy a device that will power your load, hook their suggested solar panels up to it with their connectors ... done.

Unfortunately, these are notoriously expensive, as tightly-packed engineered devices, but with careful shopping, perhaps you can get the right one on sale. I'd suggest building it yourself, as I think that is the only way to go about getting one of these w/o insane pricing, but that is a project itself.

Hope this helps ...

-3-5kg-auto-mini-washing-machine-12v

Its a top loader , I cannot find any front laoders as yet

Very doable, but a washer is a fair-sized load which would be somewhat above a 12V starter system.  I know my front-loader consumes about 300W while spinning, and about 150 while washing, so let's assume a top loader uses about twice that, or 600W spinning and 300 washing?

Alternatively, you can figure out two different ways what the power consumption is.  First, you can plug a killawatt unit into the wall, and the washer into that, and measure the total watts consumed.  You could also get a clamp meter and measure the wattage while it's starting up, agitating, and finally spinning.  Assuming a standard load runs for about an hour, I'd say total consumption is in the range 0.5 to 1.0kWh of power.

That is fairly large compared to lights or a TV, that might only be consuming ~100W per hour of use.

My usual recommendation is to have 2X as many watts of panels as your load, so that would be in the range of 1000-1200W.  Shop for grid-tie panels on Craigslist.  Don't by 100W/12V automotive panels.  They have the highest W/$ prices.

You will need the panels, a battery bank, a charge controller, and an inverter to convert the DC solar/battery power into AC.

Here is what I think you need.
1000W of panels ( about 260$ on Craigslist right now) Wire them 2S2P.  That means two parallel strings of two panels in series.
50A charge controller (look at Epever's Tracer 5415AN, about 270$)
1500W sine-wave inverter (beware, cheaper inverters are square-wave, and burn out electrical motors quickly)  Look at Samlex 24V/1500W for 550$
four 6V golf-cart batteries wired in series to get 24V (Costco has GC batteries for 99$ + tax and core-charge)

Keep in mind that a system big enough to power a washer is going to provide power for lights, TV, and a computer too, so although this is a rather substancial investment, you'll get a lot out of it.

Thanks everyone!

I think it's not necessarily as straightforward as I had hoped it would be.
Where I live the government significantly subsidized household electricity and my bill is the equivalent of 10-15 dollars a month.  (We don't have a need to heat or cool our home.) So that's just lights, fridge, washer, computers and cell phone charging.  
Probably in my situation, it would be best if I try to get a system that is grid tied and supplements the grid and returns electricity to the grid when we aren't using it--like all day Sunday, when we are in the field.

At Living Energy Farm they use daylight drive solar to run most of their appliances. They use universal motors that can run off of DC or AC current. For washing clothes they use a cement mixer.



You can read more about their daylight drive solar system in Alexis' book, Empowering Communities