Washing machine H&C fill with "no heat" setting?

Solarjunkie

Our Indesit washing machine has a snowflake setting, meaning "no heat". I use it most of the time, turn off the cold fill until rinsing, then fill with our almost free hot water which is heated by wood.

Now after many years it looks like we may have to replace it. As all new washing machines are cold fill only (which makes sense if you have to pay to heat the water anyway) I will try and track down an older machine that has had little use.

Are there any other makes that had no-heat settings?
TIA

Cardew

I believe you can still get American top loader hot and cold fill top loader machines. Like this - albeit shown as currently unavailable.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heavy-American-washing-machine-Important/dp/B001U8EBNS


I read that the main reason for having cold fill only, is that modern machines use much less water on all cycles, so even with a hot fill machine by the time the water(at house temperature) in the hot pipe flows into the machine it has reached capacity and very little hot water enters the machine. Obviously that depends on the length of the pipe run.

Most washing these days is at 30C or 40C and that uses very little electricity to heat the small amount of water. My older cold fill Bosch used 0.4kWh(say 4p) for a 40C wash for the whole cycle and I suspect less than half of that was to heat water. My new machine uses 0.3kWh for the whole cycle.

For those of us with a water meter the cost of water for a washing cycle far exceeds the cost of electricity. I pay around £3 for a cubic metre(1000 litres) of water and sewerage. The Bosch used between 59 and 80 litres for a cycle. So the cost of water is at least 18p a cycle compared to about 4p for electricity. Older machines often used over 100litres a cycle.

My point is, that with your technique for using free hot water, your savings with a modern machine would be minimal; and if water is metered the amount it uses is the major consideration.