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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I wasn’t trying to be awkward. But it is a fact that hot/cold fill machines are sold in Germany – and I can see no reason why they are apparently a good idea in Germany and not in the UK.
One comment I do recall reading was that of a manufacturer who claimed that hot and cold taps are common in Germany but not in the UK, which is why there is no demand in the UK. If I’ve ever heard a stupid bit of BS then that is surely one of the most stupid. What kind of research have they undertaken to make such a sweeping statement?
One thing I do know is that the take-up of solar water heating is greater in Germany than it is here simply because the German Government offer significant grants to householders – but take-up is growing here and users of solar water-heating are a significant number now. And we all want hot-fill machines to use our free hot water. I haven’t had to heat my water by gas or electrity since March.
Dave said:
I understand that the biological enzymes are fine up to 40 Deg. The point you raised though is one of the arguments for cold fill washing machines. Although not everybody uses biological detergents a very significant percentage of a washing machine manufacturers customers do. The manufacturers maintain that the best wash results when using biological detergents are achieved when starting in cold water and gently raising the temperature.
Of course I’ve said before, and I think we all agree, the perfect solution is to reintroduce the hot water valve but make the washing machines sophisticated enough to utilise it when appropriate such as when doing a hot maintenance wash, or when doing 60 Degree washes. They can have specific biological wash programmes or a simple option button to tell the washing machine which type of detergent is being used.
They could even have a setup procedure which informs the washing machine what type of hot water supply it is connected to ie combination boiler, hot water cylinder, solar power heated so its fuzzy logic can take this into account when carrying out the wash programme.
Richard said:
You may have answered your own question there Richard. Maybe as take up increases in the UK as you described they will be introduced here too.
Oliver and Andy are both quite right that the time taken to recoup the money on either new and working machines (such as my LG) or old machines with a short life such as Andy hypothesizes about will be overly long and indeed it may never pay back.
I’m not so sure, I buy some of them. No one has said they are incompatible with bio detergents. They say that biological detergents work and perform better when slowly released by the water being gently heated from cold water. However I agree this is not an argument for removing the hot water valve, it is only an argument for not taking in hot water when a biological detergent is being used. Presumably the manufacturers decided that it would be much simpler to just dispense with a hot water valve but as we have shown on this blog, it is perfectly possible, nay desirable and probably essential for washing machines to start using the hot water valve in a sophisticated manner in order to be truly economical in all circumstances and be versatile enough to be as economical as possible under all the different circumstances of use.
But as the vast majority of people in the UK are presumably still using hot water from a hot water storage cylinder upstairs it only proves that a certain percentage of users may not benefit from letting the washing machine heat up the small amount of water that that it uses. Presumably manufacturers always knew this and designed the washing machines to be more economical for the majority of people. There’s nothing wrong with that per se. But again, as we have shown many times over through these comments there is a strong argument for saying this is not good enough now. There is a strong argument for saying if washing machine manufacturers seriously want to make more environmentally friendly washing machines they need to make them clever enough to be able to run optimally for all of their customers, and to take into account the growing number of people using environmentally friendly hot water supplies and all those people who will never use biological detergent etc.
You’ve already shown that the LG washing machine does not properly utilise the hot water so it offers little if any benefit to 40 degree and below washes. Also the Miele All Water machine’s claims to be more economical are based on specific figures such as washing for a family of four, around 250 times, at 55 Deg. I don’t know for sure whether the 55 Deg figure refers to the inlet temperature or the wash temperature. My educated guess is that it is referring to the wash temperature and saying if you wash at 55 Degrees or above for a family of four around 250 times a year then it is cheaper to use a hot and cold fill machine. It may well be that washing at 40 Degrees, which is the most commonly used program in the UK by far is not more economical with the All Water model.
I would be very surprised indeed if Miele believed that a hot and cold fill washing machine is cheaper to run for the majority of people in the UK and yet still provide only cold fill washing machines despite the clear and powerful advantage they would have over competitors if it were true.
Nice work Dave. The main thing that strikes me is your confirmation of the Energy Savings Trusts opinion that modern washing machines use more energy than old washing machines because they have more features, which makes no sense because the only thing that uses any significant energy in a washing machine is the heater and that’s used much less because it needs to heat a lot less water up than older washing machines did.
It’s also at odds with the current Time For Change campaign sponsored I believe by the government in which they claim modern washing machines are more energy efficient. So much so that they recommend dumping any washing machine over 10 years old.
Quote:
Do we really need to dump our old inefficient appliances to save money and the world?
In a recent report, Which? stated, “…Heating water in your boiler is more efficient than in a washing machine, so plumbing a hot water supply into a washing machine usually makes it cheaper to run…”
So I wrote to them saying “…I have solar water heating and for around nine months of the year pay nothing for my hot water and would therefore benefit from a hot-fill washer (or dishwasher for that matter). But none seem to be available in the UK and your tests never even mention the fill aspect. I do know that some manufacturers (Miele is one) do make hot-fill machines but do not sell them in the UK…”
And they replied, “…I have checked with our Research team and they confirm that, as there are so few on the market these days, we do not gather information as to whether a product is hot-fill. We cannot advise you on how best to locate these items, however, the Research team have taken your feedback on-board as something to consider for a future report.
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> For now, I can only recommend that you check directly with manufacturers, ask in store, or perhaps a local independent retailer…”
I responded and wrote, “…Many thanks for this. I have done all the things you suggest and have found that, although several manufacturers make hot fill machines, none supply them to the UK. It’s possible to get them in mainland Europe and in Australia – so why they can’t be sold in the UK I really cannot conceive.
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> I wondered whether you had some secret source of supply or possibly were able to bring some pressure to bear. The exhortations we constantly receive about saving energy ring rather hollow when those of us who have a supply of “free” hot water can’t use it to wash our clothes or dishes…”
And their reply to that was, “…Thank you for your reply email regarding your quest for hot-fill appliances. I am sorry to learn of your findings and confirm that I have passed forward your email to our Research team for their consideration with regard to a potential future report…”
So, polite and with promises of further action but rather less than I had hoped from a powerful organisation like Which?
Now that the summer’s over I get only a small amount of free hot water, so I’m not going to rush – but come March when I top using my boiler, I will again start to pester the manufacturers.
I am sceptical about that, at least as a general rule of thumb statement.
If you heat the exact same amount of water in a boiler and a washing machine maybe most boilers might be more efficient (although by how much I don’t know – and I thought boilers wasted a lot of the heat they produce).
However, the washing machine only needs to heat less than a bowlful of water and (usually) to only 40 degrees. In the average UK household the hot water is heated to 60 degrees and in a tank containing many gallons of hot water, which starts to cool straight away. The pipework to and from the boiler are often lengthy and rarely lagged so many litres of hot water are trapped there and get wasted.
Heating only the exact amount of water required in a washing machine has surely got to be more efficient than having a boiler heat up water to 60 degrees only to be instantly cooled down by mixing with cold water in the machine. Solar powered heating may be different, but by far the majority of people don’t use it.
Hi Dave,
That made very interesting reading.
Looks like LG use one hell of a flawed design. 15 seconds of hot water, it makes you wonder the point of them fitting a hot valve in the first place. I too have heard problems of getting spares for LG machines, from what I’ve heard you’ve done pretty well by the sounds of it. It would seem that a reconditioned machine is the way to go. I would NEVER have a modern machine again, until they make them work properly like the old ones.
Most Likely true Richard – especially since I noted elsewhere in the leaflet that I posted the link for that they mention being able to programme some of their machines to carry out rinses with hot water (when the hot connection is used) to improve the rinse results, so I am sure that they (and everyone else) has “statistics to prove everything” up their corporate (and not very well washed) sleeves.
Having said that, in Miele’s favour, John Lewis have been telling people that cold fill is better for at least 15 years to my knowledge and yet machines made by a large number of manufacturers, including Hotpoint, Hoover, Bosch and Whirlpool have still had hot fill as standard until as recently as 3 years ago, so some of the blagging has to land at John Lewis’ feet I think.