I don't care if it's a small percentage of my symmetric gigabit fiber, I only care why they supposedly need it and where it ends up.
A phone number or a timestamp is a tiny amount of data.
In the quaint olden days, you had to go out of your way to volunteer to be a part of some study to have any aspect of your activity recorded every few seconds 24/7 to be collected and analysed like that.
It also doesn't matter that my washing machine usage might not seem like sensitive info. It's wrong by default rather than OK by default. You need a compelling need to justify it, not the other way around. It needs to be necessary to prevent one dead baby every day or something, not the other way around. No one needs to produce any convincing example of harm for that kind of collection to be wrong.
But even so, it's easy to point out how literally any data can end up being sensitive. Washing machine usage could lead to all kinds of assumptions like, this person does not actually live where they say they do (which impacts all kinds of things), or this person is running an illegal business, or housing too many people for the rating of the dwelling or allowed by the lease, etc, or just another data point tracking your movements in general. Or even merely to get out of 10% of warranty claims.
They did not. They went out of their way to buy a washing machine and maybe use some monitoring or alerting feature it offers. I decline to believe you do not know this.