I did get a response back from Ecoegg yesterday morning, only an hour or so after I’d contacted them, which is a fairly good turn around. It wasn’t the most helpful response but at least they sent one. Their advice was that their labs apparently found replacing the pellets when they got smaller yielded the best washing response. That didn’t satisfy my curiosity about why or answer the query about whether smaller ones come out of the egg and get stuck in washing machine pipes. They also said that they knew some customers did just top up and there is no problem if I’d rather do that.

I think we’re going to stick with my original plan and use the smaller ones for operations outside of the machine, like hand washing and pre-soaking. That avoids the potential risks I anticipated but also avoids the remnants just becoming yet more landfill.