Using washing machine economically

sallyrsm

I had a cold fill AEG but didn't realise the computer bit that told it to heat the water was broken so whatever temp I was using it washed in stone cold water. For well over a year!! No discernible change in wash quality!!
I only realised one time I was doing towels on a "boil" wash and realised that I couldn't smell hot washing powder like I had been able to before....

Oh and I use my machine on Economy 7 as I'm always up that early with DS... however LOL I am with EDF Energy who are that dim they have never changed my meter clock so my Economy 7 ends at 9 in the morning....

I can get so much done cheap! Cooking washing tumbling the lot. Ha ha ha ha ha

Viper_7

trying-very-trying wrote: »

I used to be on white meter electric, I used a timer plug, and set the machine to come on so that it was just finishing at about 7o'clock. Hubby gets up at five and I used to get up at about half past six, so it was never really left running with no one around.

Yes I do put it on over night, it has a built in timer.

You were lucky if you found a dual fill machine they are very rare, it may have been old stock?

It's still inefficient to wash clothes in hot water straight off it's better to have cold fill only, and you don't need to boil wash anymore, so heating it up to 35/40 isn't that big a deal. Another reason to only use cold fill as the hot water will be too hot and destroy the enzymes in the poweder.

zarazara

does the machine have a cold wash programme? I wash most things in cold water nowadays, ironing with a hot iron kills any dust mites on bedding etc solong as it comes out clean theres no need to wash things in hot water.

Penelope_Penguin

Hi there :beer: As this has now fallen from the front page of Old Style, I'll move it to the In My Home Board, for more replies

csnann

My washing machine has an "economy" setting that takes hot water from the hot pipe. It is about half an hour faster than the usual 40% wash setting so saves money that way, too.

kwatt

I'll paste the standard reply to the question you're asking...

kwatt wrote:

There are, currently, no machines on the market that fill intelligently in the way that would allow this to work in such a way as to save you money or heating water in the machine itself I'm afraid. In fact it is rare these days to see one that has hot fill as, due to the low fill levels on modern A Class washers the amount of water drawn is usually not enough to draw any hot water from the system. Any machines with a hot fill capability will generally only fill with hot for one fill on a 90˚C or higher wash after the pre-wash stage and at no other time.

In effect, the actual amount of warm water used will be very dependent on the length and bore of the pipework to the machine which will determine how much water is lying cold in the pipe itself.

Therefore, while in theory drawing from your heated water saves energy in practice it very much depends on the length of the pipe from your heat source to your tap or the time till hot from a combi or condenser boiler. In the vast majority of homes the pipe run is too far or heat time is too long (often both) and the customer ends to paying a premium for a hot and cold fill machine which is actually operating as cold fill. All it effectively does is fill your pipes with hot water which goes to waste. Because of this we do not supply hot and cold fill as one offs to individual members of the public as it is highly unlikely that it will save them any money in the vast majority of cases.

To demonstrate this take a 1.5 litre empty plastic bottle and fill it from your hot tap. In the vast majority of cases the water will be at best luke warm and in the vast majority of cases it will be stone cold and need to be heated to wash temperature in any event.

To get hot water to the tap means running off the cold water lying in the pipework and effectively wasting that water, to fill intelligently would require that you waste the same water for every instance where the hot fill is called for. Of course in areas where water use is metered this is costly as well as impractical.

Asides from which there are a host of other problems with hot fill, not least of which being that you cannot control the incoming temperature which can cause damage as well as cause detergents not to work as they should since they are designed to operate on a temperature curve, not immediate immersion in hot water.

More info in HERE but that article does need a bit of updating to be fair.

In short it is, as that article more or less says, a waste of time in most homes even if you use solar heated water or whatever, unless the washing machine is slap bang next to the hot tank. Even then, they're not geared to offer an intelligent fill and, if one were to be used, I can pretty much bet that not many people would be prepared to pay the extra to have it or pay for the wasted water to do it.

Very few manufacturers will gear up to make a very small niche machine that would cope with the few score people that would see, maybe, a minor benefit from this.

Then, we poor service engineers, would get grief about poor wash results as the detergent wasn't doing the job on the shortened cycles as a lot of the technology is wrecked by using hot water from the get-go and it would reduce agitation times which means a lot less cleaning being done.

It's never as easy as you think and it's all a compromise.

HTH

K.