Fabric Care Label Decoder Calculator

Water heating is modeled as the dominant energy cost, scaled directly from how far the wash temperature sits above roughly 15°C for a standard 50-liter load — so moving from a Cold (20°C) to a Boil (95°C) setting multiplies that heating term many times over, while the wash motor and dryer contributions stay comparatively small and steady across cycles. That's why the biggest lever for cutting energy cost per load in this calculator is always the wash-temperature symbol, not the cycle type or drying method.

It's a direct pass-through of the mechanical-action bars printed under the tub symbol: 0 means no bars (a normal, full-agitation cycle), 1 means one bar (gentle or permanent-press), and 2 means two bars (delicate or hand-wash-level agitation). The calculator uses that same code to set both the recommended maximum spin speed and part of the wash-time estimate, so a higher aggressiveness number always corresponds to gentler, not harsher, handling.

The calculator only adds dryer energy when tumbleDryOk is true, which is only the case for the two tumble-dry codes (any heat or low heat) — codes 2 and 3 are air-drying methods with zero machine energy, so the dryer's kWh term drops to zero even though air drying still takes real time, which is reflected instead in the much longer total-care-time estimate for those two codes.

You can, but you have to translate each symbol into the matching option yourself — the calculator takes numeric codes for wash temperature, mechanical action, bleach, drying, and ironing rather than reading an image, so its output is only as accurate as your reading of the tub's internal number, the bar count underneath it, the triangle style, the circle style, and the dot count inside the iron symbol. Every one of those symbol shapes and their meanings is defined by ISO 3758:2012, the international standard that manufacturers actually print their care labels against, so a correctly-read label translates into this calculator's codes exactly.