The water pressure round here is pathetic. It is in much of London to minimise water leak loss in the mains. A mate who lives nearby has a modern house - all mains pressure. Takes forever to fill a bath.
You have a bungalow with the bathroom next door to the kitchen?
Doesn't have to be pressurised to be dangerous.
There was a baby boiled alive when the immersion heater thermostat failed and the hot water boiled, water from the hot tank went up into the cold tank in the attic through the relief pipe, and the plastic tank (over the nursery) softened and failed.
That case is why newer immersions all have both a thermostat and a high temperature trip.
There have been a few injuries where pump over and the like have caused a plastic header tank to collapse and fail. Why it's allowed I will never know.
Is there a modern washing machine on the market that actually uses a hot feed?
Low water content machines and the programs designed to wash cold first, in order not to fix some staining, mean they only need/use a cold fill.
In the UK washing detergent manufactures are now advertising "save energy, save the planet" by washing at 20 degrees Celsius.
We have a gas combi boiler here. Both our washing machine and dishwasher are cold fill.
The thinking behind that before Combi's became commonplace was (a) to avoid draining the hot water cylinder denying others from a bath or shower unless taken cold and (b) to reduce standing heat losses in the pipe run and the machine would just heat the exact amount of water required.
The main flaw with that is the cost of heating water by electricity is 3 times teh cost of heating the same water by gas.
The combi is right next to the dishwasher and washing machine so I fitted two thermostatic mixer valves. So the pipe runs are very short.
One is set to 40 deg C for the washing machine and the other set to 60 deg C for the dishwasher.
The result is that the programme cycles are shorter as less time is taken to heat the water up to the set point and reduce the running costs of both machines.
The reason why the dishwasher one is set to 60 deg C is that the plastics within are only rated up to just above that and the reason why the washing machien one is set to 40 deg C is so we avoid hainv hotter water going in for when we do wish to wash at 40 deg C. Otherwise, we could increase it to 60 deg C as the washing machine has teh same plastics as the dishwasher.
If you can still get clothes as clean, and it doesn't greatly extend the length of washing programmes, then yes.
You do have to look carefully at the programs available on different machines - they are generally much longer than those of older machines and only some have a "Fast Wash" and/or "Express Wash" program for times when you cannot wait so long.
My Bosch has two cold water programmes that appear to be solely for energy labelling "in accordance with EU directive...". They take 4:30, so I don't think they expect anyone to use them for actual laundry. ("Normal" programmes take 1:15-2:30 or so.) Oddly they are labelled 40 °C and 60 °C, but with boxes around the "temperatures". (Shades of the VW emissions cheat.)
Our shower room (it was the only bathroom when we bought the place) is downstairs, and everything is gravity fed from the loft tank.
The shower pressure is OK without a pump, and I know that if ever they cut the water off for anything we have a _lot_ of toilet flushes up there.
The kitchen and the (new) upstairs bathroom are fed with mains cold for hygiene reasons. Sadly this means the washing machine and dishwasher get hard water - a separate softened feed the length og the house was just too difficult.
Andy
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