New washer/dryer arrives in the next couple of hours

[DamonHD]

Hi,

The bearings on our old washer/dryer died letting out some real smoke in the middle of a 1200rpm spin a few days ago.  We've already had that machine repaired once for a problem with the dryer, but I think that replacing the main bearing is like drinking decaf coffee... You just threw out the whole centre of its being!

So in great haste we managed to select a replacement, from our favourite mid-range manufacturer (Zanussi), which will, unusually for the UK, allow a wash in unheated water.  With our inlet temperature varying between 10C and 20C, and washing detergents now advertised to work down to 15C, we may be able to do without heating the water at all much of the time, especially in summer, which might save ~90% or ~1kWh/day.

The newer machine also claims to use 1/3rd less water per kg of wash, which is good in itself of course.

The sust-it.net site was very helpful, but the Energy Saving Trust was not as it refuses to endorse any washer/dryers even though it does approve the separate appliances and not all of us have the space for two appliances or even intend to use the dryer other than very rarely!

Rgds

Damon

[bob golding]

hi damon,

 i think cold fill is the norm nowadays from my research. not sure about these very low temperature washing powers though. how to put this delicately?

in a word bugs and their eggs. a friend of mine who is a medical entomologist has pointed out that things like house mites,cat fleas eggs and other common parasites will not be killed at the low temperatures of modern washing powders. she told me this some years ago when 40 degrees was considered low. i dont see this as a problem with household machines but could be a problem if the idea catches on with places like college laundries. we all know what students are like. just another thing the green revolutionaries in the detergent industry has not thought about, or even worse ,has thought about but forget to mention it.

 happy washing

bob

[dnix71]

If you dry your clothes in a heated tumble dryer with a lint filter after washing in cold water, that should get rid of most household bugs. A little bleach now and then during the rinse helps, too. If you dry on a clothes line, then you will just be bringing the indoors back inside with you.

The cheapest washers in the US now only have one inlet. If you want water temp control, then you buy a Y connector or a Y hose and then manually choose how much water from each side to add.

That's stupid of the gov't to even allow that, because there may be a pressure difference between sides that will result in cross back flow. The heated water here should not be drunk because heaters use magnesium and aluminum anodes to protect the steel tank.

How would a manufacturer in the UK require a heated water hookup? Are the hot and cold water outlets different sizes? If you want to cross the lines here, it's easy enough since the hose fittings are identical. Sometimes people do it by accident. By convention to left hose supply is "Hot," but I seen places where that wasn't so.

I've used washers that had "warm" or "hot" in every cycle with two inlets. To save money, I just hooked up a Y hose "backwards" so the cold water supply went to both hot and cold inlets on the washer.

[DamonHD]

This new machine of ours is cold-fill only.

For the amount of water it draws hot water would not arrive from the combi/boiler before the machine stopped filling.  Especially given our bizarre pipe layout.

A 'maintenance' wash every 6 weeks or so at 60C or higher is now recommended to clear residue build-up.

And yes, if we did get anything nasty (or a really foul vest from our baby's nappy exploding) then we'd ... ahem ... bring forward the maint wash!

Rgds

Damon

[tanner0441]

Hi

In the UK we have a red pipe for hot water, and a blue pipe for cold water, the pipes are the same size and also come in grey (gray), white, and I have seen black and other colours. All the same size fittings.

Brian

[dnix71]

I live in south Florida, so it took me a while to realize "cold" water here isn't "cold" in England. I don't think the tap water here goes below 20C even in winter.

Liquid soap works better in colder water, but it cost more than powder.

[DamonHD]

Hi

In summer our inlet temperature will be 20C and there's at least one tablet formulation and one or two liquid/gel our local supermarket that should be able to cope.

We did a test cold (10C at the moment) wash with a 30C-rated detergent tablet and it didn't do much as you might expect.  But it did use 90% less electricity, so it's worth striving for IMHO on the principle that conservation is so much better than almost all the alternatives!

I'm looking at the "Ariel Excel gel" non-bio specified to work at 15C at the moment.

Rgds

Damon

[Capt Slog]

Re. UK Hot water hook-up....

There's no difference here (UK) between the hot and cold outlets either. It's possible to hook up either and it's left to us just to get it right by the colour code. Hot outlets have a red valve lever and cold ones a blue.  The pipes are sometimes coloured that way too, or just the screw collars at the ends.

I have a hot fill on my washing machine, but I don't have a hot water tank.  All my hot water goes through a gas boiler which lights the moment a hot tap is turned on anywhere in the house, called a "multipoint" and or "instantaneous" system here.  The hot water comes through at 'mains' pressure, or something very close.  It's cheaper for me to let the boiler do the heating than the electric (or at least I've always thought so, something I'd better check!).

.

[DamonHD]

Do check: unless your machine is very close to the boiler in terms of pipe run, and your wash is 60C or more, it's likely to be better to just do cold fill, is my understanding.

You may simply be able to do better most of the time by switching as many washes as possible to 30C/40C.

Rgds

Damon

[dnix71]

They banned phosphorus (phosphates) from detergents here over 25 years ago. That element is the one of the big three (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) that is short in the local environment. Phosphates break down grease well, but would make the algae bloom when the treated sewage is discharged from septic tanks.

Linear alkyl benzyl sulfonates (linear ABS) was also banned because it will foam at about 1 ppm and doesn't break down in the environment. It isn't toxic exactly, but a glass of water with a head on it doesn't sell well. [It was a daily reminder that you were drinking recycled p!$$] It was a great foaming agent, though. The branched chain version is still legal, I think. Bugs can break down the branched chain version.

Even the trisodium phosphate sold at hardware stores is bogus many times. They put TSP on the box, but its actually sodium meta-bisulfite, which is nowhere near as good at cutting grease.

I grew up in Tampa. We got our drinking water from the Hillsborough River. In the summer you didn't need to add bleach to the wash, because the tap water already had plenty. Water hyacinths from China were common in the river, but they have no salt tolerance. When they got close to the dam at the mouth of Tampa Bay, they would die, sink to the bottom and rot. The bleach was needed to make the water drinkable. If you didn't like drinking bleachy water, you could put a couple of gallons in the fridge and wait a day for the chlorine to dissipate.

[DamonHD]

Interesting...

Here, phosphates seem to be legal and a major constituent of our dishwasher detergent: I'm quietly on the lookout for a viable alternative.  Viable means available from our supermarkets, not more than double the price of the (budget, effective, legal) stuff that we currently use, and has to work on the same cycles.

I don't know the active ingredients of the new 15C washing detergent we're hoping to try.  Have to find out.

BTW, UK tap water is always chlorinated AFAIK, but not so strongly as to register when drinking it. I believe that some pets and plants prefer you to let their water stand a little for the Cl to dissipate.

Rgds

Damon

[dnix71]

How much is Ariel? (Proctor & Gamble in the UK) They make bio and non-bio versions. Maybe pretreating would help. Some machines have an extra cycle for a pretreat soak before the regular wash.

They banned chlorine for water treatment here, except for 4 times a year to flush the pipes. Chloramines are used instead, or UV and ozone. UV and ozone are more expensive, so you can guess which is used more often. Chloramines don't work as well at killing bugs, so the chlorine flushes are needed to kill off the slimes that grow in older metal pipes.

We get advance warning of the periodic flushing. The sediment and crud discolors the water and can foul toilet valves to the point of needing replacement. If you have an ice maker, it either has to have a replaceable filter or a programmed backwash cycle.

The water here is usually treated with aluminum sulfate and then buffered with carbonates so it is slightly passive, to minimize rusting older metal pipes. The flushing removes some of the lime scale buildup and extends the life of the pipe.

When they went to chloramines everyone's toilet leaked and the makers of the rubber tank flappers had to change the material they made them from. The ammonia in chloramines may be worse than chlorine alone. People with kidnney problems don't need the extra nitrogen.

http://www.chloramine.org/chloraminefacts.htm

Chlorine was banned because we drink swamp water. The tannins (plant color) reacts with bleach to form compounds suspected of causing cancer, but chloramines don't.

[DamonHD]

The gel 666ml bottle is enough for ~18 washes and costs ~£3.90 I believe, so just about 20p per wash.

Now, if that allows us to run a wash on cold and save 0.5kWh--1kWh @ 20p/kWh marginal, then compared to our normal 10p-per-wash tablet we're evens or better.

I expect competition may bring down the cost of this type of formulation.

As to the water treatment: you gave me pause and a little Googling brought up these:

http://www.water.org.uk/home/policy/positions/chlorine

28 March 2007:

All public drinking water in the UK is disinfected before supply, usually by the addition of a chemical oxidant such as chlorine, chlorine dioxide or ozone and increasingly through the use of physical disinfectants such as ultraviolet (UV) light.

and http://www.dwi.gov.uk/pubs/chlorine/index.htm

Drinking water in England and Wales is of a very high quality but you may sometimes notice a slight taste or smell, particularly of chlorine.

So maybe a little Chlorine treatment has been displaced by other methods these days.

Rgds

Damon

[DamonHD]

So I bought some of the Ariel Excel gel today and we tried it on a small mixed load 'cold' tonight.  The Excel claims to work down to 15C and our inlet temperature is about 11C, but I thought that that would probably be close enough for government work given some safety margin built into the advertising claim.

I was able to dispense a half dose of the gel rather than putting in a whole tablet of our usual detergent, so at ~10p that didn't cost any more than usual.

I used the 'proportional' synthetics programme on cold (the machine reduces wash time and water to match the amount of laundry you put in) and it managed to do a decent job in 40 minutes and 0.06kW (about the energy to boil the water for a large mug of tea), ie less than a tenth the energy of a normal warm wash!

Excellent: if this works for most of our typical laundry mix then we will have cut maybe 90% off our laundry energy consumption and therefore may average less than 5kWh/day total consumption at home over a year; another 10--20% cut.

One wash doesn't make a summer, etc, but this may be real conservation in action repaying some research into the machines and detergents available.

(Do you think it'll brighten my halo?)

Rgds

Damon

[ghurd]

<blinded by the halo>

The 5 gallon pails of Sam's Club laundry detergent stuff works just fine for us.

In hot, warm, or cold water.

Need to reduce the amount of that detergent in cold or warm water or some of it never disolves.

We use about half what the instructions call for.

"Amount".  Does it really take the same amount of detergent for my work clothes as my wifes work clothes?  

She works in an office.

Gravel often washes out of my hair in the shower.

G-

[DamonHD]

Well indeed, my work clothes are office-only too, but our rugrat does have a (not-so-)secret weapon to test the most vigorous of washes...

One of the tricks of using this new toy^H^H^H washer efficiently will be learning the minimum/appropriate temperature and detergent for each type of load, given this new flavour.  At least with this gel form we have some analogue control over detergent dosage again which we gave up with tablet form.

But in any case I think/hope that we'll now be able to do most washes cold saving most of the energy for each wash, probably even in winter.  (Our inlet water doesn't get more than about 2C than it is now at its very coldest that I've measured.)

Rgds

Damon

[dnix71]

Here's an article that explains our problem pretty well. The phosphate ban has people in Washington State driving to Idaho to buy dishwashing detergent that actually works in cold hard water. The tap water in the US northwest is like yours. Soap doesn't work in hard water, a bipolar (hydrophillic and hydrophobic) detergent is required.

The "eco" brands just do not work. Adding water softeners is a crude/vulgar/hateful suggestion on the part of the lake management people. Poor people can't afford that, and the salt that softeners use is a pollutant in inland lakes.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090327/ap_on_re_us/bootleg_detergent

[DamonHD]

Thanks for that: very interesting...

Rgds

Damon