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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Whoever thought that it would save energy to have coldfill only clearly never did the weekly wash themselves. Yes, you can run the hot tap to get the hot water through to the machine and yes, it does waste hot water in the pipes. BUT – if you are going to take an extra hour for each washload (which effectively is what happens nowadays) this means that any chance of drying the whole weekly wash outside on a washing line is lost, thus making sure you have to use a tumbler dryer. How this is supposed to help the environment beats me, so I can only imagine that the EC decision-makers who are behind all the energy saving regulations live somewhere warmer than here. By the way, I am just scrapping a Beko machine, which is only 18 months old and cost £374 to buy. I shall be biting the bullet and buying ISE next, but wish I had kept my 14 year old Hotpoint which did a 40 deg wash in an hour and just kept repairing it.
Thanks for your input David. Large capacity washing machines do use more water and energy and are only more economical because they can wash a lot more. Therefore unless you are regularly filling one (and most people would struggle to properly load anything over 6Kg for most washes) they are not more economical. As you say David, they can be shown to be more economical per Kg but the average load size for the UK is no where near 7, 8, or 10 and 11 Kgs and more like 3Kgs according to a Which recent survey.
I wrote some critical views on eco labels about 3 years ago – Are energy labels on Washing Machines misleading? | Eco-labels suggestion
I think we all agree that it would be a very simple thing for manufacturers to make dual-fill machines that were intelligent enough to mix water so that it arrives in the machine at the correct temparature – after all, thermostatic showers have been doing this for years.
What the real mystery is why manufacturers don’t sell such machines in the UK even though it seems they do actually make them. The other mystery is why no manufacturer neither contributes to this discussion nor replies truthfully to enquiries. If it weren’t for the fact that one can conceive of no reason for it, one would suspect a conspiracy.
@Chris comment #566.
I suggest you put the detergent tablets into the drum at the back, before loading the laundry. Your soap drawer (and its inside surrounding) will need cleaning with hot water and a small brush, as the incoming cold water makes the soap residue stick!
Your washing is not as soft as it used to be because your new washing machine is using less water during the rinses and not rinsing out all the detergent. This is best addressed by reading the blog article Why can’t modern washing machines rinse properly?.
My comment #460 via that link (after the first paragraph in that comment) may be helpful to you.
I’m very disappointed with today’s washing machines, they are nowhere near as good as the old hot and cold fill ones! :(
Hi
I was interested to read the trials of getting a cold feed washing machine. As some will know I had to get one as well, A beko WM1501W. I have tried it with just cold water and again by adding hot from the adjacent tap through the soap draw. No problem thus far though I am not sure if I reached the full 25degress C that Beko said I could feed it with (in writing). I plan to get a mixer valve so that I feed with just 25deg and perhaps a little more we wash mainly at 30. In TWO PLACES IN THE BOOK it said Page 6 First use Ensure that ther Hot and Cold connections have been made correctly…. Otherwise your laundry may come out Hot at the end of the washing process and may wear out. Page 9 Modles with a single hose………… This raises the question Why the difference.
Should the debate be widened across the net??
Re post 569.
Yes, I think this debate needs widening a great deal further.
Your instruction book further illustrates the point that Ricard and I in particular, and many others too, are sick of making but getting a poor response to: “Manufacturers DO make hot and cold fill machines, but just won’t sell them in the UK. WHY NOT???”
Any suggestions how / where / via whom or what we widen this debate?
Can someone send an email to BBC R4’s You and Yours programme on this? Preferably not me, as I sent one on another subject this morning.
They cover consumer interests of all kinds, so should be prepapred to take this up.
One would like to think it’s illegal to refuse to sell to us, under EU single market law. But they can probably pick and choose to whom they sell.
Worth a try I guess.
I have today sent the following:
There is a vast blog with articles like I want a washing machine with a hot water valve and a second at a sister site, stuffed full of concerns from people who, like me, have found that COLD ONLY washers are desperately UNeconomical in use, despite the manufacturer’s claims to the contrary.
Further many of us have discovered that the Uk seems to be the only EU country, possibly the only country in the world, where we CAN”T get hot and cold fill. Makers like Miele, Electrolux, Beko and many others make hot and cold fill machines and sell them everywhere from Russia to Australia and everywhere in between, but they refuse to sell in the UK. Many publish information on how much energy is saved using hot fill, but when their own literature is shown to their UK offices, they just flatly deny that hot fill is even possible, let alone better. Many of us have contacted Miele, AEG, Zanussi, Beko, etc. (details on the blog) but they either refuse to reply or just chant the same mantra, rather than explaining why the UK is being left out. Can You and Yours help us to find out why??
This is especially upsetting for those of us with Solar or district heating schemes, as we get “free” hot water but are forced to leave it standing and pay to heat washing water by electricity.
It looks good to me. The only attempt I made to broaden the debate was when I wrote to Which? They did not publish me letter nor did they make any comment then, or later, about dual fill machines.
I did mention the fact that Maytag (and maybe other manufacturers as well) supply dual-fill washers in Canada, as I saw when I was there last September.
I also made the point that this is rather ironic, since the cost of energy in Canada is so much cheaper than it is in the UK, that the savings afforded by dual fill must be very much smaller than they would be in the UK.
This correspondent’s advice is laudable – had it not been for the fact that we have all been complaining to the various manufacturers about this for years – and they either ignore us or lie to us. Maybe an email from Canada might get a response – although I’ll not hold my breath.