Product review (1 stars): Wasted my money
I bought this for cloth diapers and for felting. Diapers - this was fine as a precursor to using the regular washing machine. I filled it with water and put in the soap and sloshed it round and round. When the water drained, it was nasty and yellow as expected. Then I filled it a second time and it was the same. The third time (and by now I don't feel it's saving me any water) the water ran clear but the diapers still smelled like, well, diapers. During the third go round, my husband came in and asked how was this easier than putting them in our machine. I don't know! And they were so sopping wet they wouldn't have air dryed well at all. Just what I need - semi-clean dripping diapers.

Felting - I was hoping to use this for felting b/c fibers can damage a washing machine. I put in a long length of handwoven wool to felt it into a solid mass for sewing into a bag. My daughter and I took turns cranking it (b/c your arms wear out after a while) for an hour and there was so little agitation that the fabric looked nearly the same as when it went in.

This came with almost no instructions beyond assembly. How much water are you supposed to put in? Is it to just cover the clothes? Is it up to the top of the barrel? When you turn the crank, you can hear the clothes going up and falling with a splash but that makes for uneven cranking - your arms wear out faster with each "thunk". But if you turn it fast enough that you can turn evenly, you can hear that the clothes are stuck to the sides. As one reviewer said - the key is agitation and this machine has none.

Also, it's much much bigger than I anticipated. It's hard to store, hard to carry to the bathroom, uses a lot of water, and takes up a lot of time and attention per load. If I just dump things in the washing machine, I can at least do something else while the clothes are getting clean.