(Last updated: April 3, 2026.) This post is available for discussion on Reddit.

The Short Version of the Story#

“How can I get my LG Front Loader to use more water?!” The fact that this is such a common recurring question points to a real need for more information about the inner workings of LG front loaders and how to extract the best cleaning performance from them. I know I struggled with this question for a long time, and I went down a couple counter-productive roads before I finally figured out how to get wash results I’m happy with. This post is a recounting of my journey.

Let me start by just giving you some answers:

1. The cycle and cycle modifiers you choose have a HUGE impact on how much water is dispensed. This is documented poorly and can be quite counter-intuitive. If you feel like you’re chronically not getting enough water in your loads you should probably use the “Towels” cycle for most of your washing. There are a lot more details about cycles and cycle modifiers below if you want to read them.
2. LG front loading washers sometimes dispense less water than would be ideal. The good news is that if you want more water in your load, you can just add it. The best way to do it is to wait until the washer has completed load sensing and has finished dispensing water for the wash cycle. Then add the additional water by pouring the correct temperature water directly into the detergent dispenser drawer using a pitcher. Yes, it’s that simple.

If you really want to know more about how load sensing works, what some of the different cycles and modifiers are actually doing, and want to know what my personal favorite cycles are, then read on :).

The Long Version of the Story#

Since LG front loading (LGFL) washers change behaviors based on machine model, machine model year, cycle selection, cycle settings and modifiers, load size, and load absorbency it is impossible for me to describe with certainty what every machine is going to do in every case. This post is not a comprehensive inventory of LGFL washer behaviors. Rather, my goal is just to share what I studied so far and what choices I’ve made for my own laundry. I can confidently say that I am getting cleaner laundry today than before I started this journey. Hopefully you can take something from this post and get better results for yourself!

Before I jump into this I should provide some important context:

1. Everything in this post comes from my direct observations of the three different LGFL washing machines I have (or had). Those machines are the WM4370HWA from 2018, the WM3900HWA from 2021, and the WM5800 from 2026. I’m glad I had a range of machines to compare, because I can confirm they have differences across identically named cycles!
2. I have only looked closely at the “Towels”, “Bedding” (formerly named “Bulky/Large”), “Heavy Duty”, and “Full Load” (downloaded) cycles, and I’ve focused mainly on the “Steam”, “TurboWash”, and “Extra Rinse” modifiers.
3. I have very soft water and am very sensitive to detergent residue. Rinse performance is as important to me as wash performance. If you don’t have overly soft water or sensitive skin, you may have more wiggle room in setting up your rinses than I do.
4. I’m using US machines which we know have behavior differences with temperatures. I can’t say whether or not the water level behaviors are the same in international machines. YMMV.

It’s entirely reasonable to ask why I didn’t start by analyzing the “Normal” cycle. My answer is that on all machines since about 2021 choosing the “Normal” cycle forces you into using the “TurboWash” modifier, and this specific combination just doesn’t seem to provide a wash cycle time or water level that works well for anything other than the easiest loads. (This combo really looks to me like it’s optimized for energy star compliance over wash performance… but maybe that’s just me being cynical.)

Ok, with all of that out of the way, let’s get on with it.

Water, Water, Everywhere (But Nary a Drop to Wash)#

Water level is a complicated topic for a front loading washing machine, and it’s not as simple as “more is always better”. To frame the conversation, let’s look at the extreme ends of the range. On the low end of water levels, if the machine doesn’t dispense enough water to get everything in the load completely wet then there’s no way it can “wash” your clothes. You gotta get wet to wash! On the high end of water levels, if the machine dispenses so much water that the clothes are just floating in water while the drum rotates around them, well, then that’s a soak cycle not a wash cycle. Your machine is trying to land somewhere in between these two points. But where?

Low Water Cycles, High Water Cycles, and Load Sensing#

Some LG cycles seem to purposefully shoot for lower water levels. I cannot say for sure what LGs goals are for each cycle type and those goals aren’t documented in any meaningful way, but I hypothesize there are a few reasons why a cycle might want to shoot for lower water levels:

1. Maybe they are trying to increase the rubbing friction of the textiles to improve surface cleaning.
2. Maybe they are going to apply steam and want to make the thermal sink of the wash water as small as possible.
3. Maybe they are using the onboard heating element to raise the wash temp and want to keep the water level as low as possible to save energy and let the temp rise happen more quickly.

Some cycles shoot for naturally higher water levels. I hypothesize reasons possible reasons for this as well:

1. Perhaps they are trying to provide better dilution for wash soils and oils.
2. Perhaps they are trying to ensure that bulky, hard-to-saturate items are getting completely wet so they can be cleaned effectively.

Furthermore, even though the machine’s intentions are generally good, its methods are far from foolproof. During load sensing the machine rocks the drum and measures the electrical resistance with a Hall Effect sensor. It uses the resistance to approximate the size of the load by weight. Then it goes into a loop of dispensing a little water, rolling the drum to let the water soak into the clothes, and re-measuring the load weight again. It often does this process multiple times to approximate how much water the load can absorb. Then it uses this estimate of load size and absorbency to decide how much water to dispense. Lot’s of things can throw this measurement off, like fabric bulk, soiling that affects absorbency, and even natural variations in the absorbency rate of different fabric types. The system does sometimes make mistakes, and those mistakes can be compounded by choosing a less-than-optimal cycle for the specific conditions of your load. Also, very little of this is explained in the washing machine documentation so it can feel incredibly random.

Should I Adjust the Water Level in My Load?#

A good question to start with may be: do I even need to adjust the water level of my load? I would say that before you get into water level adjustments you should first make sure you’re selecting the right cycle and cycle modifiers for your goals. Once you’re confident you’re choosing the right cycle, you may find you sometimes get value from making small adjustments to water levels when your machine is being overly cranky or stingy. If you find that you’re consistently making LARGE water level adjustments, you have probably chosen a cycle that works differently than you want. (I find myself adding water only occassionally these days, and I’m usually adding a liter or two at the most. And I’m probably making more adjustments than are strictly necessary because I’m way down this rabbit hole lol.)

How Do I Decide If I Need to Add More Water?#

Once tub filling is complete and the wash cycle has started, turn on the drum light (if your machine has one) and look at the wetness of the clothes and the water level in the drum. You will need a good flashlight if your machine doesn’t have a drum light.

For intentionally low water cycles (e.g. a cycle with steam enabled), you’re looking to ensure that the load is wet all the way through and that there’s enough wetness in the items to allow some water to move through the clothes so the detergent can disperse evenly throughout them. You should not see any dry spots, and if you watch the edges of the fabric carefully you should be able to spot at least a few water drops falling from the edge of fabric somewhere in the load when the drum action stops. For these cycles you probably won’t see a pool of water in the bottom of the drum.

For reduced water cycles that are emphasizing friction surface cleaning (e.g. the Heavy Duty cycle) you should see some water in the bottom of the drum, but won’t necessarily see a big pool of water. It may be appropriate to boost the water level in these cycles a little for specific load conditions, but if you feel the urge to massively raise the water level you should probably choose a different cycle instead. (There are more details about why boosting the water level in the Heavy Duty cycle can be a problem outlined in my cycle notes below.)

For high water cycles you’re looking to ensure you have enough water to comfortably dilute the soils and oils of the load, but not so much that it’s interfering with tumbling. For high water cycles and large loads there’s a big viable range so you need to make the call based on what you think the loads ultimately needs. The more water you add the more soils and oils dilution you’ll get, but the less friction cleaning you’ll get. Everything is a trade off.

More isn’t always better. For example, if you’re washing a small load of synthetic items and use a high water cycle, the clothes aren’t going to tumble… they’re just going to float around in the drum.

How Do I Add The Water?#

If you’re going to add water, it’s important to do it at the right time: after load sensing and tub filling are complete. You should always start by letting the machine do its load sensing on your dry load as you intend to wash it. This should get the water level close to right for the load and cycle you’ve chosen. Since the water level applies to both the wash and rinse cycles it’s important for the machine’s calculations to be as good as possible - so let that load sensing run!

After the tub filling is complete and you’ve examined the water level as described above, if you want to add water use a pitcher to gather the desired amount at the right temperature and pour the water directly into the detergent dispenser drawer in a slow stream. I usually add about a liter at a time and re-check after each increase. Once your happy with the water level, you’re done. If you overfill the washer you might trigger an overfill error (OE) which will terminate the load and drain the washer. I have never hit this myself even with big water additions, but I think it’s possible so I’ll mention it.

Note that if your detergency for the load is too low you can add detergent with the water! I tend to be cautious with my detergent dosing because of my chemical sensitivities, but when I clearly didn’t add enough detergent I just use this technique to add a bit more.

Are there Other Methods To Get More Water?#

I started out trying lots of different ways to pre-wet my clothes to trick the machine into sensing a larger load size so it would dispense more water. While there are ways to make this work sometimes, it has too many pitfalls to be a good solution IMO. Light pre-wetting at a level high enough to influence load sensing makes the absorbency calculations more random. Heavy pre-wetting (e.g. with a pre-wash rinse and spin cycle) drops the wash temp by too much and it’s already really hard to get a proper hot water wash out of the US versions of these machines. I basically don’t recommend pre-wetting as a strategy. It sounds good, but it’s not great.

There are also YouTube videos that will show you how to modify your machine to raise the overall water level. I briefly considered doing this, but I ultimately decided it was a bad idea because it might make the naturally high water level cycles (which are my favorites) perform less well because of overfilling. Everything is a trade-off.

Cycle Modifiers#

Before we talk about cycles, let’s talk about the cycle modifiers.

Temperature: This is a complex topic for the US LGFL machines and I have a whole separate post that talks only about temperature that you should read. For now, though I will say this: some of the LGFL machines (the ones with steam and sanitary cycles) have built it heaters and some do not. But all the US machines have temperature rules that are aggressively energy saving and VERY different from what a lot of LG documentation says. A “hot” water wash is likely going to be between 100F-108F (38C - 42C), which is technically warm. A “warm” wash is going to be closer to 85F / 30C and will probably be too cold to meaningfully activate any sodium percarbonate in your detergent. In my measurements on a new WM5800, the “extra hot” setting on the sanitary cycle tops out at 134F / 56C, which is just a proper hot wash and not sanitizing at all. I know some folks love cold water washing, but with the chronically short wash cycle times on these machines I just don’t see the point. Given the relatively small amount of wash water used, this is not a big energy burden. Rinses are always in tap cold water.

Soil Level: My opinion here is also that you should max this out every time. The wash cycle times on these machines are aggressively short and it’s hard to extend them. Maybe it’s because the machines need a lot of time to do a passable job at rinsing, and consumers often react negatively to very long overall cycle times even though that’s honestly what’s required in a good HE washing program.

Extra Rinses: Different cycles have different rinse configurations. For example, the towels cycle has three rinses built in by default and you can add two extra rinses to bring the total up to five! In contrast, the normal cycle (which requires TurboWash in the latest machines) has only a single rinse stage by default. Rinsing is a dilution process and these machines work with small amounts of water so they need multiple rinse stages to rinse your clothes effectively. If you have extra soft water, or are chemically sensitive, or are heavy handed with the detergent, you should always add all the extra rinses available IMO. If you’re not sure, just watch your final rinse cycle closely and see how much detergency you can detect. If it’s barely detectable or undetectable, then perhaps you can scale back a rinse. If you’re seeing a small amount of detergency in your final rinse, then you’re probably in a good place. If you’re seeing a lot of detergency in your final rinse, you probably need more rinses.

Steam: The Steam cycle modifier might be a way to extend your wash cycle time and enhance cleaning, but the way its packaged in the LGFL program is inscrutable. Observationally when you have steam enabled on a cycle that supports it your machine will start by doing a LOW FILL. Then it rolls and steams the clothes for a while to raise the temp. After the steam phase ends the machine brings the water level up to the cycle target and runs the rest of the wash cycle. Sadly, when you enable steam you lose a lot of normal configurability in the cycle and the choices the machine makes aren’t always clear or good. Here are just some of the pitfalls I’ve observed with the steam modifier in the few cycles I’ve examined:

1. Steam disables TurboWash and that slows down the initial wetting of the clothes and the initial dispersion of detergent. It’s not clear if the extended cycle time that you get from steam is enough to overcome extra time it takes to get the actual cleaning started. In good cycles where TurboWash doesn’t materially nerf the cycle, the benefits of rapid initial wetting and detergent dispersion are likely far greater than the theoretical benefits of using steam to heat the textile surface.
2. If the machine undershoots the mark on the water level during the LOW FILL, there might not be quite enough wetness to let the detergent disperse evenly throughout the load until the steam phase of the cycle is complete which further diminishes cleaning performance.
3. When I mapped out the Allergiene cycle with an industrial temperature logger in the drum I was expecting to see the cycle dispense hot water which in my house is minimum 115F. However, I was shocked to see that the machine set the fill water temp to a tepid 88F, and that the drum temp stayed below 100F for more than half the cycle. In fact, the cycle was above 100F for only about 20m and the peak temp was a mere 113F / 45C. Allergiene is a laughably poor cycle for cleaning bedding IMO, and this makes me even more suspicious in general about the value of the steam feature on these machines.

Given my observations so far I’ve largely abandoned looking at cycles with the steam option enabled.

TurboWash: It was really hard for me to wrap my head around TurboWash at first because it’s disabled when you enable steam, and it seems to do additional things when enabled on the “Normal” cycle (e.g. shorten the cycle time aggressively and maybe nerf the first rinse stage). This variability confused me and I started out mostly not using TurboWash. Over time, however, I realized that TurboWash when it just turns on the recirculation sprayers is a valuable player in the cycle. Specifically, TurboWash speeds up the initial wetting of the load and helps speed up the initial detergent dispersion, which help make the most of the relatively short wash cycle time on these machines. In general you should turn it on, and probably avoid using the “Normal” cycle.

Cycle Notes#

Ok, finally, let’s talk about the cycles I looked at.

Heavy Duty: I started by looking at the Heavy Duty cycle because… well… it’s called Heavy Duty! Also, when you select Heavy Duty and Steam, you see a really long run time on the machine display, which seems promising if you want a long, hot wash. However, I quickly discovered that the Heavy Duty cycle is surprisingly NOT great for daily laundry. For a standard load with normal soils, Heavy Duty fails in two ways. First, it’s a LOW WATER cycle because I assume it’s set up to increase the wash friction of the load for cleaning off surface soils. (This is what it means by Heavy Duty.) Second, it uses a turbidity sensor to look at the dirt level in the wash water. When it discovers that the load isn’t actually very dirty with surface soils, it aggressively shortens the cycle time! So washing a standard laundry load in Heavy Duty will actually result in a low water wash that will likely get cut short. Also, boosting the water level will cause the turbidity reading to go down and will terminate the cycle all the more quickly. What this cycle seems to be designed for is washing loads with really high surface dirt (e.g. a load of gardening grubbies). Because it’s a low water cycle, you should always use all three extra rinses available to the cycle. I don’t use this cycle.

Towels: I next started looking at the towels cycle. This is the best high water cycle in the machine, and is the most “load it and walk away” cycle available for regular cleaning. You should always enable TurboWash with this cycle - it’s turns on the recirculation sprayers and does not reduce wash cycle time. My main complaint about the towels cycle is that the wash cycle time is about 18 minutes and that’s shorter than I would like. You can extend the cycle time by manually pressing pause during the wash cycle. While this is annoying to do, I have found that doing a couple five minute pauses interspersed throughout the wash cycle does make the cycle perform better for stain elimination and oils removal. (n.b. I have upgraded to the new LGFL WM5800 which has a new soak cycle modifier that’s not available on other LGFL machines. This modifier adds 30m of soak and roll time at the head of the wash cycle. This is great for getting the cycle times up and Towels/Hot +Turbo +Soak is the cycle I use most these days.)

Bedding (Formerly Named Bulky/Large): The bedding cycle has high water levels. However, the cycle limits the spin speed to medium, which is necessary for actual blankets, but isn’t ideal for regular loads. This cycle is good for washing bedding that has a lot of loft like a comforter. This cycle can be used for deep water cleaning of regular laundry but you may want to supplement it with a towels cycle rinse and spin.

Full Load: If your machine supports downloadable cycles, and you can download the “Full Load” cycle, it’s definitely worth having. This is a low water cycle for washing, but… the rinse water levels are decent, and it supports adding up to 3 additional rinses and high speed spin rates. It also offers a VERY long wash cycle time: a full hour and 20 minutes at max soil. I think if you’re willing to have a bit of a heavy hand with boosting the water level on this cycle, it can be a great deep clean cycle.

My Favorite Cycles#

With all that out of the way, here are my favorite cycles as promised:

For regular, every day cleaning on my WM5800 machine that supports the soak cycle modifier I use: Towels, Hot, Max Soil, +Soak, +TurboWash, +2 Extra Rinses. This gives me enough time, temperature, and water to get the job done without supervision. On older machines that don’t have the soak feature I had to pause the wash cycle a few times manually to get a long enough wash cycle time, which was a drag. If your machine doesn’t support soak but does support downloadable cycles, you can download the “Full Load” cycle and do: Full Load, Hot, Max Soil, Extra High Spin, +TurboWash, +3 Extra Rinses. After the filling completes for the wash cycle, boost the water level manually by about 2L - 4L. These settings are a decent approximation of a European 40C cycle.

For solid hot water deep cleaning like you’d get in a European 60C cycle I use: Sanitary, Max Soil, +TurboWash, +2 Extra Rinses, and after the water filling completes for the wash cycle I boost the water level by about 4L. (Note that in March 2026 I observed a potentially dangerous bug in the current WM5800 firmware that if you use the soak modifier on the sanitary cycle AND boost the soak water level by more than 2L the machine will get confused when the soak stage transitions to the wash stage and go into a loop that looks like it will lead to overfilling. If you use sanitary and soak together, don’t add more than 2L of water to the soak unless you’re prepared to monitor the soak to wash transition. There has been a firmware update since this time but I haven’t re-checked the behavior.)

Thanks for sticking with me for the wild ride. I hope y’all find something useful in this for yourselves. Share your own tips in the comments below, and happy washing!