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Regular
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I noticed a wee snippet in the Guardian at the weekend from a frustrated customer wanting to buy a washing machine with a hot water feed; apparently there are none available.
Has anyone tried? If this is in fact the case, I wonder if there has been any campaigning to get one of the manufacturers to actually supply such a thing or if it might be worth pursuing? For people with renewable systems like back boilers or solar thermal creating hot water it seems pretty daft to then be using electricity to heat cold water in appliances.
Seems a bit weird there's a demand there that is not being met. I don't know if the situation is the same with dishwashers as I don't have a non human one mesel.
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Veteran
Posts: 275
| I've heard this complaint before, and some folk have apparently altered their washing machines to accept hot water - which seems pretty unsatisfactory. Haven't looked myself though, or tried the alteration. |
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Regular
Posts: 53
| Having just bought a s/h washing machine from ILM we went through this debate ourselves. We were told in the shop (and we confirmed with a bit of online research) that the reason all new machines are now cold fill only is because it's apparently more efficient. Hot Water in the home is normally heated to 55 or 60 degrees - if you are doing a 30 degree wash this is much hotter than you need. It's also something to do with the way washing machines fill - I'll check out the exact website we looked at and report back.
By the way can someone tell me if Julian Paren has put his excellent ppt on our website somewhere - would like to refer to it.
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Veteran
Posts: 275
| I put Julian's presentation on the website, see http://www.transitionblackisle.org/userfiles/file%5CEnergy%20Group%... |
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Veteran
Posts: 275
| I forgot to add - the explanation for cold water feeds to washing machines doesn't really make sense - it uses the same amount of energy to heat a small quantity of water to 60 degrees and then mix it down to 30 degrees, as it would to heat the full amount to 30 degrees. And a lot of the time, solar thermal systems produce quantities of water at 30 - 45 degrees, which is ideal for washing machines. |
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| I'd heard these machines were not that efficient. Reason given to me was that when we turn on a hot tap, need to run the water for a while until hot water emerges. Same would need to happen to the supply into the hot water washing machine otherwise it would just be supplied with cold water which would then need to be heated. So you would have a hot water fed washing machine, fed cold water, which would need heated - which is basically what a cold water fed washing machine does.
Never investigated further but does seem plausable. |
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Extreme Veteran
Posts: 319
| We have an old washing machine and dishwasher. We looked at getting a new dishwasher as we thought it wasn't very efficient but couldn't find a hot feed one so managed to get it mended instead. It was on cold feed and I just got a connection made with the hot pipe, but checked that the machine was suitable for hot feed. The pipes supply hot water for the sink as well so I think the business of having to wait for the water to run before it is hot enough depends on your plumbing lay out and whether you are using hot water for other things. We use solar thermal panels to heat hot water if there is sun. We changed our shower to hot feed rather than electric too so are using the solar thermal panels. We now generate electricity as well, so some of the water heated by machines will be from renewables as well but I think the thermal panels is a more efficient way of doing it. |
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Washing machines and hot water feeds
