I still get people asking if I know of any washing machines with a hot water valve. This article gives a few suggestions – but you should read on first to fully understand the issue. It is not as simple as you might think. It could be a complete waste of your time looking for one.
Most washing machines now only have a cold water valve but many people instinctively don’t like this. We all know washing machines wash with hot water, so it seems crazy not to use the hot water we already have in our homes. Heating it all up from cold seems wasteful and unnecessary.
This apparent madness is even more annoying for people who have an environmentally friendly and economic source of hot water such as solar powered.
However, there is a good argument that because modern washing machines use so little water on wash – there is no need for a hot valve. It’s in fact more economical to use cold fill only on 40 ° washes for most (but not all) people as explained here – is a hot & cold fill washing machine more economical?.
What is the science behind cold fill only washing machines?
All this is explained fully in my article Should I buy a cold fill washing machine?
So are there any washing machines with a hot valve?
At the time of writing there are some LG & Statesman models with a hot valve. However, they don’t take in hot water at all unless you use a very hot wash cycle. There is alternatively a British made washing machine with a hot water valve. Ebac’s hot & cold fill washing machine is advertised as using, “Intelligent hot fill technology”.
Some Hotpoint washing machines appear to be hot and cold fill, but they are designed for cold fill because there’s only a cold fill hose supplied and a y-piece adaptor supplies both valves.
I suspect this is a temporary measure, and that subsequent models will just have the cold valve.
So hot and cold fill washing machines are currently very rare. But even if you find one, you need to know that the few I’ve seen rarely even use the hot water valve.
If most of your wash cycles are done at 40 degrees or less it will most likely never use the hot valve at all.
Related:
Several people have asked me if you can connect an environmentally friendly and economic hot supply to the cold valve to utilise it. The short answer is no, for more details read Don’t connect the hot water supply to the cold valve on cold fill washing machine
New comments on this topic have been closed. There were over 600 comments now trimmed down (below) to 233. There are very interesting discussions there.
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Oh dear, I have read this with dismay. I was looking to replace my 10 year old Bosch hot and cold fill machine with a new one but am finding it hard to find hot and cold fill. I too have a solar panel and lots of free hot water. I was excited to find that all the modern machines have a delay start feature so that I could time the machine to come on in the middle of the day when the sun is at its hotest. But I am horrified to find that I cannot buy a hot fill machine. I have wasted today surfing the net and I have actually found 1- a Whirlpool 10kg ( too big) 965 cms ( too tall) spin speed 1100 (too slow) at £714. Are there any 6kg ones at all??? I have e-mailed all the manufacturers to tell them I do not want a cold fill machine.
Yes, I agree with Richard – and this LG claims to have such a system, however either it is insufficiently developed and doesn’t react to the temperature properly (which I hope is the case) or else it is deliberately biased against the hot (if one is charitable one could say this would be to mimic the older machines with electro-mechanical arbitrary controls).
I wouldn’t mind betting that if you bought one of those Miele machines that they stubbornly refuse to make available to the UK market, you’d find taht it has very efficient intelligent controls.
Dave: The description of not much hot water getting into the machine before it’s finished filling is based on the 5Kg and 5.5Kg drums, which are probably still the most common size as 6Kg drums have only replaced them in recent years. But as 6Kg is the most common size for new machines, and many people now have 7Kg drums and even larger this argument holds less water (pun fully intended). It’s another reason why manufacturers should re-think the cold fill only option.
The hot weather we have been having recently has meant that my cylinder temperature has never dropped below 60 degrees Centigrade (even in the morning before the sun is properly up) and this afternoon was at 91!
It is really annoying, with this superfluity of hot water, that I am having to pay obscene amounts to my electricity supplier to heat up my cold water supply.
Sadly none of the manufacturers I have written to, nor Which? magazine, have seen fit to answer my query about hot fill.
I agree Richard.
Of recent days I’ve had the whole cylinder at temperatures of between 75 and 90 degrees from the bottom sensor (about 2 inches off the floor of the cylinder) right to the top.
This evening at just gone 8 p.m. the solar panel itself was still at 71 and after running the dishwasher and the washer on a hot whites wash I’ve still got water at 65 degrees in the middle of the cylinder and 43 at the base, with no boiler input at all.
I spoke to a woman at Which? some while ago and asked how I could become a tester for them and if I did, would I get to influence what they tested at all, as part of a panel perhaps. She asked if I had anything in mind so I told her about the frustration of not getting any hot fill washers. Her reply was “oh, they’re very old fashioned, I can’t see many people wanting to read a report about them”. Perhaps this attitude of “fashion” has a lot to answer for?
I sometimes wonder what Which’s agendum is. They sometimes choose to campaign vigorously for causes that are of little, or even no, benefit (such as their successful campaign to make sure that travel agents could only sell travel insurance if they were bonded by the FSA – which now means that many agents don’t sell travel insurance and customers have to make other arrangements). But they choose to ignore other more important causes such as the very real consumer demand for hot-fill washers and dishwashers, to the extent of not even bothering to reply to enquirers.
Just had a thought.It would be an easy task by the washing machine manufacturers to introduce additional electronics into their design to control the hot/cold intake into a machine.For example for a required temperature of 40 C,temperature sensors on both cold and hot intakes would feed the temperature values to the machine’s on board computer.(All washine machines are now computer controlled) and a simple PID software algorthm would be implemented to control the water input valves to get the set point of 40 C. So if initially the incoming hot water temperature is below 40 C,only the hot valve would be opened…..as the temperature just exceedes 40 C,then the cold valve would be opened.This would reduce the wash temperature,so the cold valve would close and the hot valve opened…this would be repeated till the water level sensor shows that there is sufficient water for the wash.This procedure could take several minutes dependent on the lenght of hot water travel.So the fill would not depend on some arbitary time value but would be exclusively dependant on the incoming water temperatures.Of course, if the hot water inlet does not reach 40 C say after 15 minutes,the computer will assume that not is available and so fill with cold and use machines heaters.
So much for GREEN and global warning and recycling.They (Wimbledon) cannot be serious.!
Thanks Richard: With a hot and cold fill washing machine I always used to turn down the cold water tap to try and match the pressure on the hot side which does help to let a little bit more hot water in on the old hot and cold fill machines.
The subject of manufacturers controlling the inlet of water via thermostatic controls on the valves and other methods have been discussed quite a bit in the comments although with over 250 comments now I expect most people will simply not read them. I bet it would take well over an hour to read them all. My understanding is that biological detergent works best when starting from cold. The enzymes are then released slowly as the temperature is slowly raised and die off after 40 Deg C. Therefore manufacturers do not want to have their washing machines start with the correct water temperature.
The issue with running the hot water tap for a few minutes prior to starting the washing machine is potentially counter-productive at least to some extent. This is because most people would just tip all of the drawn water down the sink and waste it, which is now considered un-environmentally friendly by many people and of course anyone on a water meter would be just tipping money down the sink. If the drawn water is genuinely used for something it’s not so bad.
There’s been a lot of debate on this board and it’s sister over the years, and I’ve countered the points made by Washerhelp in post 262 before:
1. Modern biological detergents may well be designed to work at lower temp’s, but increasing numbers of people are highly allergic to these and don’t use them and people genuinely worried about the environment often opt not to use them too. Non-Bio alternatives, such as Ecover non-bio (they make a bio too), actually recommend using water as hot as the fabric will stand in order to wash well with minimum detergent and therefore minimum environmental impact of any kind at all.
2. Washing machine manufacturers are indeed competing for the coveted (though increasingly seen as pointless and meaningless) A and A* ratings for energy, washing and spinning, but it’s no surprise I am sure that the likes of Miele and LG put in the small print of their instructions notes explaining that to achieve the A or A* wash that their P.R. Material claims it is necessary to select options such as “Water Plus” which add huge amounts more water and, in the case of my LG machine, the A Wash is achieved on a programme that washes at 95 degrees, uses high water level, 5 rinses and lasts for almost 4 hours. (It’s called “Baby care”.)
3. Two manufacturers that I know of (again LG and Miele) do offer a small range of machines with Hot Fill (though in Miele’s case only available on the continent) which they actively promote as saving money and energy by using hot fill.
4. Forget the ratings for energy; clean clothes and good hygiene matter far more (I know the manufacturers and some sectors of the industry regulators would not see it like this, at least not in public): if the machine gets A or A* for energy, but this can only be achieved by having dire wash results, it’s pointless. The spread of bugs and so on in modern society doesn’t need assistance from badly washed clothes and linens which harbor spores and eggs and so on, and few of us would wish to be seen wearing clothes that are uniformly grey and smell of stale sweat. Indeed, most people end up washing with their machines half full and putting things through again in order to get good results, and neither of those are remotely energy efficient or environmentally friendly.
Most of all, though, and indisputable so hopefully not contentious, the claims are simply not true in some cases. As Ashlea has found, and I have done the same and I’ve read from other regular contributors, such as Richard English, switching to a machine with either cold fill only, or cold fill on low temperature programmes, has resulted in vast increases in electricity consumption. It is a plain fact that the number of units consumed by my new washer, which only admits hot water on washes of 60 degrees or higher (fortunately most that I do are in this group) is significantly greater than that used by my old Hoover Electron 1100. It costs more to wash in this machine than it did in the old one. Ashlea doesn’t say which make her new one was but she has clearly found exactly the same and my own mother, with her Miele Prestige Plus has also found the same: I wish we could put a manufacturer or industry representative on the spot, in public, and demand that they explain how this can be energy efficiency. (And I’m pretty sure that if we’d had the ratings scheme back in 1983 my old Hoover would have scored higher than the new machines, which would have exposed the flaw in this argument.)
Dave,
I have a very old Bosch (15 years) this machine is hot and cold fill, but it is installed in a third storey bedroom and there is NO hot water supply. It has to heat the water itself, now on to cycle times….60 Cotton wash with 4 high level rinses (1/3 up the door) and 800rpm final spin is 1H 25M maximum often less, Economy 60 Cotton same rinsing and spinning 1H 30M max as before often less. 40 washes are just over the hour. The wash part of the cycle is about 25-40 minutes dependant on temp., so it doesn’t take it very long at all to heat the water from stone cold to the required temperature!!
The long cycle times are a joke I had a new Hotpoint, over 2 hours for a 40 Cotton wash with 2 insufficient low level rinses and a 1300rpm final spin.
However you are correct in saying mechanical is best, the solid state machines are over designed and often unreliable. Also the high level rinsing is correct the more water the better! The Bosch has a Higher Water Level option which adds water to 1/3 up the door, without it pressed the rinse level is about 2″ at the bottom of the drum, so the user has the choice of good rinsing or water economy!
There should be a choice of Hot and cold fill or just cold only, people are not robots, we have INDIVIDUAL requirements, this also applies to whether the machine is mechanically timed or solid state and also how much water the machine uses!!
For goodness sake a washing machine should be a simple user friendly appliance, it is there to wash, rinse and spin you clothes not be some sort of fashion statement so the bells and whistles are a load of ……!! Also energy labelling is rubbish, it tells the consumer nothing, for a modern machine to get an A for wash efficiency it has to remove only 3% yes 3% of the test stains on a piece of cloth!!
HTH
Oliver
P.S Hello Andy, Hope you are OK!!!