FoodBanter.com - View Single Post - What are currently your best saving tips ?

Tim Watts

On 15/05/10 20:03, zzzzzzzzzz wrote:
> On Sat, 15 May 2010 19:47:19 +0100, Tim > wrote:
>
>> On 15/05/10 19:34, zzzzzzzzzz wrote:
>>
>>> So you waste the water in the pipes either way. If you're washing by hand
>>> (with hot water) you're wasting all the hot water needed to get the tap up to
>>> temperature, plus the water needed to do the dishes. Seems like an even
>>> stronger argument for a hot-water plumed dishwasher.
>>
>> No, because 10m of 15mm dia pipe contains 1.7 l of water. A typical
>> model 60cm wide Miele dishawasher takes in 13l of water over several
>> fills over 1-1.5 hours.
>
> Someone just said six gallons, total. Models differ somewhat, but dishwashers
> use significantly less water than washing by hand.

6 gallons!?? How bloody big are your dishwashers? 13l is 3.4 US gallons
or 2.85 imperial gallons.

>> If it takes 4 fills (I haven't counted) that's about 3l of water per
>> fill so half of that is cold either way and the central heating has to
>> heat that half just to waste it cooling in the pipe and the machine has
>> to heat the other half from cold effectively. So it's hardly worth
>> bothering with.
>
> Why do you put your water heaters out in the street? Almost every house I've
> seen (with this being a *dumb* exception) has the plumbing centralized. My
> first house had a run of less than ten feet to every hot-water tap in the
> house.

10m was a random guess. Perhaps 6m would be more realistic average. Of
course, those of us who own mansions ;-> That's 2m just to get upstairs,
then 3m to get across to wherever the tank is then 2m for wibbling pipe
around the tank and the sink. Still a sizeable fraction of the fill and
the point about combi boilers stands (these are increasingly popular here).

>> Things may be worse with a combi boiler that actually has to fire up to
>> produce hot water from cold mains - there's now pipework wastage and
>> cold coming from the boiler while it gets the heat exchanger warmed up.
>>
>> There is a stonger argument for a washing machine having a hot fill as
>> they use around 55 litres of water for a wash - but that's something to
>> do with (supposedly) the modern detergents preferring to work from cold
>> with a gentle warm up in the machine.
>
> Our washing machine is right underneath the water heater.

--
Tim Watts

Hung parliament? Rather have a hanged parliament.