Hot and cold fill washing machines

[S Viemeister]

My washer is installed right next to the boiler. Hot water _does_ reach that washer rather quickly.

[S Viemeister]

Very few US washers heat their own water - most use hot water from a separate hot water heating cylinder/tank.

[Tim+]

Because they're stuck in the dark ages with regards to washing machines?

The only time we've used a US washing machine it's performance was very unimpressive.

Tim

[Capitol]

Date?

[Chris French]

Was staying with relatives in Canada in 2011.

I was unimpressed with the washing performance of their washing machine, compared to ours. Which was a top loading US style machine, presumably the same sort of thing. Don't know the age of the machine though.

Back to the UK, why would a cold fill only machine only work well with bio powders? I use both bio and non bio powders in ours and they both work well.- They take cold water and heat it up, as opposed to using some hot water as well and then heating that up.. True they heat the water at a speed that enables the enzymes to work first (if it is a hot wash program). But hot and cold fill machines will do the same thing, it's just that they will use some hot water to raise the wash water temp.

I would imagine that even H&C fill machines don't use hot water on the cooler wash programs. Probably only using hot water to fill on the 60+ programs. But they will still start off cool and then heat up, mostly using the hot fill water to raise the water temp higher later on in the wash I expect.

[alan_m]

Is mould due to cold fill or just steam from hot water condensing in various parts of the machine?

Unless you have 'very heavy duty soiled' washing why not just use cold water and cold water liquid detergent. Even with something that YOU may think requires a hot wash rinsing or pre washing in cold water first is beneficial in that it doesn't cook in stains.

In this household 98% of washes are from the cold supply with no heating in the machine. To keep the machine smelling fresh, about once every two/three months do an empty hot wash using a whole packet of washing soda crystals

@ £1 per kg (or £1 for 2 packs from some 99p/pound type stores)

[harry]

I used to manage maintenance in a commercial laundry shit-fer-brains. So it's not opinion.

Consumers in the USA are largely brain dead. They believe what thy're told to believe. Comes from watching Fox TV.

Your beliefs concern biological powders are drivel.

There are no/few hot water machines available for the reasons I gave. Only the brain dead don't know about this, it has been common knowledge for years and makes perfect sense.

[harry]

True. I have experience with US made "Speed Queen" and "Maytag" washing machines. The one advantage was they were almost indestructible. Poor performance, used lots of water and electricity. (More than twice as much.) Positively primitive.

[Tim Watts]

It's due to not running a 90C wash every couple of weeks or so.

Miele now have a hygiene light that comes and and forces you to do one as they've had problems with hoses getting fouled up plus "stinky drum".

[John Rumm]

You can buy the product you *think* you want. However have you checked that its not also a low water usage machine?

Hot and cold fill is pretty pointless on machines with very low water consumption.

[Capitol]

Been using US LG front loading washing machine dual fill and separate tumble dryer since 2011. These have done >3K washes at various temperatures and perform far, far better than any machine she has come across in the UK. I considered revamping the kitchen to fit a couple of these 700mm wide (?) machines in but couldn't justify the work. I estimate the last UK machine did 2K washes max before breaking. The hot water usage on dual fill machines can take place at any temperature above say 5C , depends entirely on how good the design is. IMO no cold fill machine can ever work well. The laws of diffusion say so.

[Capitol]

It is opinion if you haven't done the testing or the research. The idiot who told me that the EU had banned the machines was also a maintenance man. Get yourself educated.

[John Rumm]

US machines are not really comparable to UK ones for several reasons. Generally they are much larger, use far more water, are often top loaders. Also many will be designed to run from a 120V AC supply, which limits the electrical input power to around 1.8kW, which makes in machine heating less effective.

Surprisingly for harry, in this case he is being mostly factual. With the exception of older recon or re-manufactured machines, or imports of products designed for other markets, the vast majority of machines you will find *are* cold fill only. (as you have found!)

That does not mean that dual fill are impossible to find, just difficult. If they also comply with the requirements for low water usage, then they won't work as well as dual fill machines used to - in fact they will be worse than a modern cold fill one.

They will work with non bio as well. You will get better cleaning with bio, but that is true regardless of the machine type.

Define "should be available"? If there is no market for a product (either because technology or legislation has moved on), then the fact that there are a small band of hold outs that still hanker for how it used to be does not in itself create a viable market.

A friend of mine had great difficulty finding a replacement twin tub machine that his mother insisted she wanted - took months, but eventually a company that recons them was able to supply.

[Martin Bonner]

Hmm. Not had mould problems in our washing machine, despite (I think)

*never* having done a 90C wash.

Re US machines: do they typically run at 120V or 240V? If the former, that might be one of the reasons for hot-fill. (It's hard to get more than 13-16A through a plug+socket, and 16A at 120V takes a long time to heat anything - same reason boiling-water taps are more popular in the US.)

[Bob Eager]

Explain.

[S Viemeister]

I've never seen a 120v US washing machine. Dryers, yes, they run at

240v, but gas dryers are much more common in the US than they are in the UK. My US washing machine is a 120v frontloader with both hot and cold fill, the dryer is gas. My UK washing machine is a 240v (230v?)frontloader with both hot and cold fill; the dryer is a 240k electric. The US dryer gets more use than the UK one, gas being considerably cheaper to run.

[Tim Streater]

Indeed. Sounds like twaddle.

[Tim Streater]

My machine was a single unit but with a separate washer and dryer (i.e., so I could wash one load and be drying a second). It was 240V, with a different type of plug.

Of course local Yanks, somehow permanently behind the times, thought we have 50 different types of plug in the UK (as opposed to essentially the one we do have). My house there was the inverse of that, having (apart from the 240V supply with its own plug, probably sensibly),

3-pin, 2-pin, and 2-pin polarised. And for a system carrying twice the current that we do, the plugs were pretty flimsy.

[Adam Funk]

American dual-fill washing machines don't have internal heating elements. The "hot" program fills the wash phase from the hot tap water (including the dead leg, I presume, unless there's a diverter in the input); the "cold" program fills it from the cold tap water; the "warm" program uses a mixture. Those machines do not have the high-temperature "sanitizing" (or "blasting your towels") programs that we get. (OTOH, we don't generally get a true cold program; I'd be happy to use that for some things because they last longer.)

[Tim Watts]

Did you do a 60C wash?

I think a lot of the modern problems have come about with people never going above 40C or even 30C, because of this silly eco-bollocks that it's worth saving some small fraction of a kWh for a 30C wash vs 60C