Hot and cold fill washing machines and the consequences

[Capitol]

Well, I finally had to settle for an overpriced hot and cold fill machine from Hotpoint with a 5 year warranty. Of course it was the wrong size, ie bigger than the old one and fouled the corner cupboard door by 3 inches, so you couldn't open the door. So, it was time to buy a sliding hinged door mechanism for the kitchen. Good idea, but they don't exist. However a search in the junk collection came up with some IKEA/MFI ball bearing drawer slides, a few brackets, a couple of barrel hinges and various screws and bolts. Today it was installed and to my delight worked perfectly. Quite good, it's only taken 3 months to get around to it! I now have a cupboard door which slides across 4 inches before opening up >90 degrees and she can hide all her rubbish again. I'm unlikely to do a new kitchen, but if I were, I think I'd go for

800mm wide cabinets as the appliances are already heading for 700mm.

[Brian Gaff]

[Jonno]

Capitol scribbled

Why buy a hot fill washing machine. Unless the machine is 2 foot from the boiler/cylinder, it wastes a lot of hot water.

[Capitol]

Doesn't seem to work for most kitchen appliances. All socks are expendable, with luck the outer drum shreds them and they vanish through the pump.

[The Natural Philosopher]

The answer to that is to get a washing machine with a tighter tolerance between the spinning drum and the static housing, because that will remove underpants and socks easily and shred them.

[Adrian Caspersz]

These items disappear because exactly like the end of the first Superman film, the earth's rotation has been reversed and time itself has been temporarily dragged backwards.

The socks and whatnot hence take a different trajectory along this alternative timeline (like not enter the machine in the first place) up to the moment that the machine stops and are found missing.

[Brian Gaff]

I'm not sure about this one. I found that my old h/t one seemed to use little hot water, but the new one which is cold fill only uses a lot of leccy heating water that seems daft since I do not use a whole tank of hot water each day from the tank, why not use it? I fully understand that one would need to work out the gains and losses here, but there you go. What about a single fill and a mixer tap of some sort, would that work, ie using some of the hot water to warm the water so the machine does not have to heat for quite as long. I have some other domestic appliance questions but I'll start a new thread. Brian

[Bob Eager]

The problem is getting the hot water to the machine. Mostly, what happens is that the machine fills with cold water left in the pipe between the tank and the machine (with a bit of hot if lucky). Then the machine has to heat that, and the hot water now in the pipe goes cold.

I guess one could build a machine that pumped the incoming water down the drain until it ran hot, but you can imagine the screams at that!

[harry]

You need a mesh bag to put small items in for washing in the machine.

[ARW]

I once lost my underpants and one sock after a trip to the pub.

I told the gf it was due to time travelling aliens when I arrived at her place....

She made me sleep in the spare bedroom that night as she said it had "magical time travelling memory banks".

I think she was lying as I still cannot remember where or when the aliens put my missing underpants and sock after spending the night in that room.