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.
Spares
Spares4Appliances is a spares company run by repair engineers who understand all about spare parts for appliances.
Hullo again everyone,
This one is destoned to be the hottest (pardon the pun) topic of 2008 at the rate we are all going!
Washerhelp’s points above are great (as always) – and prompt me to add a couple in reply.
My solar hot water is indeed “free” in my eyes, but Andy (Washerhelp) is right, there is of course the initial installation cost. However, it really does pay to shop around. I won’t post huge detail because it’s not the right topic for this board, but if anyone wishes to know more about my experience please feel free to mail me (Andy, is it OK for me to post my e-mail address later for anyone who wishes to use it?). Suffice to say that a year or more of research on my part resulted in me getting a 180 litre cylinder, pre-lagged to 2″ thickness, and the rest of the solar stuff for well under £2.5k (as a package deal) and I had it fitted by my local plumber for significantly less than £500, making the grand total cost significantly under £3k.. The factory lagged cyclinder as an upgrade to my previous one which held less than a quarter of the volume of water and did not retain the heat anywhere near as well has already saved me, by very rough estimation, about £200 in gas at today’s prices in the year since it went in, and that’s without the actual solar heat input – in other words just in the winter months when the solar input is at it’s lowest. In summer I get 180 litres of water that is too hot for safety really without the boiler coming on at all. Compared to my gas bills previously (around £540 per year and I am a low user!) I am seeing about a 50% reduction in actual payments but allowing for the huge price hikes I must be saving a considerable percentage more. My very rough calculations at the time of installation (October 07) were that at the prices then the solar system should have paid for itself in under 5 years.
I’ll say no more on that now as it really isn’t the right board to be posting on.
Turning to dishwashers, my old Bosch that I had in the late 80’s (and which was pretty rubbish and I ditched it and went back to hand washing) would accept hot water even though cold was “recommended”. It dried with residual heat, i.e. it heated the final rinse water to about 70 degrees then drained and sat for 30 minutes or so whilst the dishes drained and dried from the heat in the pots.
In 2002 I bought a Hoover triple A rated Dishwasher (HD97) which had fan assisted drying, but this involved no heat at all in the drying phase; it again heated the last rinse water to 70 plus degrees then simply blew room temperature air through wide flat ducts wrapped around the cabinet (presumably to pre-warm the air from the residual heat inside?) and then into the wash cabinet though a vent near the bottom and out through a vent under the door catch. It dried very well indeed and didn’t use that much electriicity. It was also a hot fill model with hot fill “recommended” and cold fill acceptable if no hot available. However it was a very unreliable machine and although it had a 5 years parts only warranty the call out fees to get Gias to repair it (any one else doing repairs invalidated the warranty on the parts I was told) came to over £300 in the first 4 years I had it so when it packed up again before it’s 5th birthday I got rid of it and bought a Miele which also recommends hot fill and which also has fan assisted drying. Again, the machine heats the rinse water (in fact it heats on ALL rinses but heats the last one to a high temperature) and then circulates air using a fan. It also has some sort of condensing system because during drying it runs the drain pump much of the time and there is a steady trickle of water pumped away for much of the 32 minutes drying phase. It’s very energy efficient (it’s AAA rated) and uses only around 0.75 kWh of electricity for a 75 degree wash which lasts about 1 hour and 15 minutes using hot fill. Miele advised via their web support service that all of their dishwashers should be connected to hot water where possible and they even state that doing so will save energy costs over using cold even if your water is heated by gas or oil.
Going back to the washing machine debate, the TMV3 valve does, as Andy correctly states, mean that I am rinsing in warm water, but as the LG washer warms up the final rinse water anyway (claiming that this gives “a higher purity of rinse”) I am only really adding warm water to 2 rinses that would not cost money to warm up anyway. Although the amount of water used for rinsing is quite high, at leastin the summer months when my hot water is heated for free by solar, I don’t regard this as a cost, and even in winter, there is so much water in the cylinder, which I could never possibly use in one day, that I don’t think it makes too much difference.
Miele also make a machine (infuriatingly only avalable in Germany at present) which will draw hot water and they state that blended hot and cold (i.e. warm) water is used for rinsing on that machine to achieve better rinse results. Having high regard for Miele I feel that if they make this claim then I can believe LG when they state the same reasoning.
He he – this was suppose dto be a short response ….and just look at it!!!!!!
Hello Dave: Nice pun, did you notice my pun about the hot water spiel looking like spin? It wasn’t as good as yours though.
I can see that you are very similar to how I used to be in that you put a hell of a lot of research in before buying anything. However, I don’t know how old you are but as I’ve got older I do find I am less inclined to spend the amount of time I used to and no longer enjoy it as I used to. I tend to just use Which? online these days.
If you are happy to put the e-mail address up that’s fine. Thank you for your respect for the blog and trying to keep on topic.
Thanks for giving details about the solar heating costs. It confirms my point that although I can understand people seeing hot water heated by solar panels as free, in truth it is more expensive for several years at least until the investment is repaid. At that point you need to trust that it continues to work for several years longer in order to prove as good an investment as first expected.
Having invested so much money in solar powered water heating I can really understand people’s anger and frustration when realising their white goods appliances are not using any hot water. Having invested in an LG hot and cold fill washing machine I can equally imagine the frustration at realising that even it hardly takes in any hot water. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think the time has come for white goods manufacturers to rethink this cold fill decision unless they know that the future is in cold water washing. But as they all advise to do a regular maintenance wash on at least 60 Deg C it is highly desirable for anyone with solar powered hot water to fill with hot only on such a wash.
If LG & Miele are already using warm water rinses and claiming it is better I wouldn’t be surprised if the next thing is warm water rinsing anyway in which case a solar powered hot water supply would be ideal.
The fixed cost apportionment has to be considered with solar heating and that is difficult to establish precisely since it depends on how long the installation lasts.
But regardless of how much that is, the variable costs of the system (the hot water used) are very low, being simply the cost of the electricity used to run the pumps. In that sense the water is free, regardless of how much is used. I try to consider the installation costs (which I am paying over 3 years on an interest-free loan) in much the same way as I consider the standing charges for my other utilities.
Lets not get too fixated on the solar water heating option as the only source of low cost hot water as it can be an expensive one as has already been discussed. Hot water from burning wood very efficiently can be a heck of a lot cheaper financially.
Although, cost should not be considered in simply financial terms, especially in the present economically unstable conditions that we find ourselves in at the moment (and more than likely will for some considerable time to come). It has been shown recently that money could suddenly become relatively worthless (i.e in the event of banking collapses that happen worldwide). We could all feasibly find that our money savings held simply as figures on computers around the world might suddenly mean nothing. The present slowing down of the collapse has only been as a result of the restoration of confidence in the money markets by even more artificial figures being borrowed from even bigger banks computers and this has temporarily propped up confidence. That is all! The whole thing will soon fall apart as it is based on misplaced confidence. Confidence that economic growth will continue forever and of course this is a nonsense as we live in a finite world with finite resources. This means that the basic premise on which confidence in the banking system is based is an unsustainable illusion.
Added to that the cost of fossil fuel energy doesn’t take into account the real cost of cleaning up the legacy of the mess it leaves for future generations to have to clean up (it they can!). In this sense there is a good arguement to be made that people who have enough money at the moment to invest their money in sustainably powered heating systems almost have a moral duty to do so. Also they had better do it sooner rather than later as this buying power could feasibly get wiped off a computer in the not too distant future. So from a future security point of view investing in renewables makes more sense than ever now. Not just for moral and environmental reasons but from a security point of view as well.
With this in mind, I can very confidently say that the future of washing machine sales must be in using as much sustainably heated water as possible. Have you seen how much the sale of wood burners in the Western world has shot up recently and continues to climb despite the drop in oil prices? People know that governments, banks and fossil fuel companies can’t be trusted with their future security at all any more. All the cards in the world are now on the table and everyone knows what the hands are and what the players’ motives are and they are selfishly purely profit motivated. The manufacture that starts to make truely hot/cold fill washing machines will inevitably steal the show if they market their product with these points in mind.
In fact you could say that they’ll CLEAN UP (to follow the recent zest for puns!). Just look at the massive success of the most watched and repeated Grand Designs programme on the TV. It was about a guy Ben Law builiding his own house largely out of the materials to be found around him. This obviously appealed to many people’s imaginations not just out of idle curiosity but because what it demonstrated was that people can potentially take control of their life’s security and source their home and energy needs from their own locality in a sustainable way. The challenge is how to marry this more naturally based life with the benefits that modern technology bring like washing machines.
So, in my opinion, the hot and cold filled washing machine is the inevitable future. Does anyone out there have any real influence on particular manufacturers out there?
Mike.
Hi Dave,
Did you ever get a reply from Miele in Germany who were going to look into the possible availability of their W3841 WPS Allwater washing machine in the UK?
Does anyone know if one can simply order one from Germany and simply plug it in over here in the UK? Is it 220V over there?
Mike.
For information i contacted Miele about the machines they do in Germany:
My Question: Please can you tell me if I can get a Miele washing machine that uses both hot and cold water to fill in the UK? I have free solar hot water and so do not want to waste energy heating cold water to wash.
I believe you do this sort of machine in Germany now.W 1747 WPS Eco Line ?
Can you advise please?
Miele UK answer:
Good morning,
Thank you for your email regarding Miele washing machines.
Currently we don’t have any models that use both hot and cold fills. We only supply cold fill machines here in the U.K. I have spoken with my colleague in purchasing and we have no plans in the near future to introduce a hot fill machine here in the U.K.
Kind regards
Emma Bevan
Sales Advice
Miele Company Ltd
That sounds like a typical bit of manufacturer’s PR rubbish to me. People are employed to write these kinds of bland comments so as to get rid of troublesome customers, to avoid their having to do any work.
If you read the response it doesn’t even make sense:
“Currently we don’t have any models that use both hot and cold fills. We only supply cold fill machines here in the U.K. I have spoken with my colleague in purchasing and we have no plans in the near future to introduce a hot fill machine here in the U.K.”
The first sentence contradicts the second since theh firstly say that don’t make hota and cold fill machines (at all) and then they say that they “don’t supply them to the UK” – which implies that they do make them but don’t import them.
But of course, as we are now in the EU, they can’t refuse to supply any EU customer with any machine – although it would be up to the customer to arrange import and transport. I would imagine that there would be no trouble running a 220v machine on 240v – but if that were a worry, transformers are cheap enough to buy.
If you’re sure that the W 1747 WPS Eco Line is hot and cold fil, it should be any easy matter to order one from an online supplier and request delivery to your home address. Or even order one from a dealer in France or Belgium and simply drive over and collect it.
Hi Richard: When she said we don’t have any models, I think she probably meant Miele UK, we in the UK don’t.
We have 230 volts in the UK, have done since the mid 1990s although I’m sure most people didn’t notice the change.
I don’t believe they are that much more economical, especially at 40 degrees. I think the hot machine they do have in Germany only claims to be more economical on hot washes. The extra costs in getting one imported would take so long to recoup I’m not sure having one imported would save any money.
As far as Miele is concerned there is no demand for a hot and cold fill machine so there’s no way they’d consider introducing one unless hundreds of people were asking about it.
I can’t help thinking if it was genuinely more economical to use a hot and cold valve they would bring it in and claim it’s much cheaper than everyone else’s.
One of the reasons Miele gave me for not selling it here in the UK was that “most of the households throughout Europe usually only have a cold water tap” but in the UK we’ve virtually all got a hot tap next to the cold for our washing machines.
Hi all,
No, I never got a further reply form Miele (Germany) and must admit that periodically the thought that they have not replied briefly appears in the porthole of the washing machine of my mind, rather like the proverbial red sock in the whites wash.
I’m interested in Sarah’s research and Miele’s response and I am also in total agreement that this is PR bulls*it (let’s hope their washing cycles have a special “Bulls*it removal programme”!). Grammatically is doesn’t make sense, also as pointed out by Richard, but I think Andy’s right: what she meant was they don’t have any in the UK: the UK’s Education system (trust me, I’m a lecturer!) is, like our range of washing machines, a poor relation of our German counter-part’s and no doubt her sloppy use of English, typical of so many people in the UK these days, was well intentioned.
I’ve never counted how many individual contributors there are on this board, but if every single contributor individually contacted Miele UK (and indeed Miele Germany if they so wish) to demand an explanation as to why they don’t import one of the TWO models that are now available in Europe that have hot and cold fill, it is just conceivable that Miele may start to recognise the demand.
Meanwhile, I gather, from extensive Internet research, that Miele are expanding (slowly??) the number of mainland European countries that they supply Hot and Cold fill models to, so maybe there is some hope yet.
Anyone wishing to contact Miele and pull one rug from under their feet by showing them their own sales pitch for how much better the hot fill system is can easily get the sales leaflets, in English, from Miele and Electrical supplier web sites in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, ………. Would be interesting to see what Emma Bevan’s colleagues had to say when confronted with their own company’s materials!
Keep the hunt / lobby going folks!
More inaccurate PR spin, I reckon. Their statement “…most of the households throughout Europe usually only have a cold water tap – but in the UK we’ve virtually all got a hot tap next to the cold for our washing machines… actually directly contradicts their reasoning.
If households throughout Europe have only cold taps, then the last thing they need is a dual fill machine. And vice versa in the UK.
It might be worthwhile pointing out to them the complete illogicality of their claim.