The Triumph of Modern Efficiency

The modern washing machine is, apparently, a triumph of efficiency.

This is what I am told, anyway, and I am sure there is a spreadsheet somewhere to prove it. It only takes in cold water, heats precisely what it needs, uses clever programmes, saves water, saves energy, and no doubt strokes a polar bear gently on the head before moving on to the rinse cycle.

Except, of course, in my house.

I have solar PV on the roof, an air source heat pump, a hot water cylinder, and a pumped hot water system. In other words, first thing in the morning I have a tank full of hot water sitting there, like a perfectly competent employee waiting to be given a job.

So naturally the washing machine ignores it.

Instead, it takes in cold water and then uses its own internal electric heater, which is basically a kettle with delusions of grandeur. This morning the battery was at 34% when the washing started. The washing is still nowhere near finished, but the battery is already down to its minimum state of charge, which is 12%. Brilliant. I have built a small domestic energy system so the washing machine can mug it before breakfast.

And before anyone says “just run it later”, yes, thank you, I had considered the revolutionary idea of arranging domestic life around an appliance with the intellectual flexibility of a brick. There is no delay timer, because apparently that would have been dangerously useful. The reason we do the washing first thing in the morning is so it can go out on the line early and get a full day of heat, breeze and UV doing its thing. That is not some romantic attachment to pegs. It is the other half of the energy calculation. The sun is not merely there to flatter the solar panels. It can also dry and freshen clothes in the old-fashioned way, without turning the utility room into a branch office of National Grid.

I do understand the general argument. In the average house, the hot pipe run may be long, the machine may only take a small amount of water, and by the time genuinely hot water arrives it has already finished filling. Fair enough. If your machine is six miles from the cylinder, somewhere beyond the downstairs loo and past a cupboard full of forgotten extension leads, cold fill may well make sense.

But that is the problem with modern “efficiency”. It is often designed for the statistical average household, then imposed on every household as if the rest of us are simply being difficult. The machine has no interest in whether the hot water is already there. It has no interest in whether the pipework is already primed. It has no interest in whether the battery is being drained at exactly the wrong time of day. It just gets on with the job, with the serene confidence of an appliance that has never had to read an electricity bill.

Yes, I could choose a cooler wash and let the socks experience personal growth at 30 C. I could rearrange the morning around a machine that appears to have been designed for someone else’s house. There are workarounds. There are always workarounds. That is how you know a system has been designed around assumptions rather than actual people.

What irritates me is not that cold-fill machines are always wrong. They are not. What irritates me is that the market has quietly removed the option for houses where hot fill would be perfectly sensible. We have reached the stage where the appliance knows best, the user gets one hose, and any domestic energy system more complicated than “plug it in and pay the bill” is treated as an eccentric hobby.

So there we are. Solar panels on the roof, heat pump outside, hot water in the cylinder, battery on the wall, washing line waiting in the garden, and the washing machine still behaves as if every house is a bland little box with a combi boiler and a pipe run designed by someone who does not own a tape measure.

Progress, apparently.