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Thread: How to run washing machine without council water

  1. #11
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    Not sure how true it is - one of the jojo tank guys I spoke to says you get 1bar pressure for every 10 meters elevation...

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    Gold Member Houses4Rent's Avatar
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    A Jerry can is not enough water for a machine. I will have to see

    A) whether I can gain enough pressure by elevating a suitable sized drum on my roof (will have to dig out old school/study books to work it out)
    B) whether my roof structure can carry that load
    C) maybe I try my luck contacting the machine manufacturer about the issues around minimal pressures required.
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  3. #13
    Diamond Member Justloadit's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Singhms View Post
    Not sure how true it is - one of the jojo tank guys I spoke to says you get 1bar pressure for every 10 meters elevation...
    Correct - Just great how SI units work seamlessly in all spheres of measurement
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  4. #14
    Diamond Member AndyD's Avatar
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    Okay, I was sitting in traffic for an hour the other day and I was thinking to myself how you could run your washing machine from a drum or bucket without the need for pumps or controllers or elevated tanks and other complicated or expensive solutions. I had something of an epiphany.... why not just fill the machine yourself manually through the half-open soap draw (assuming it's a front loader) by using a bucket and a funnel or a 10 litre camping water holder that has a small manual tap on it or even a normal garden watering can without the sprinkling attachment on it. It's a low tech solution but it just made sense because that's all the automatic fill solenoid valve in the machine does anyway..... it just squirts water into the soap drawer.

    The only issue I can think of is that pouring water into the soap draw manually and slowly might not cause the soap powder to be fully mixed and carried into the drum of the machine. Also if you use soap powder and conditioner in different sections of the draw then the manual pouring could get a bit complicated to synchronise it with the right part of the wash cycle so the conditioner goes in at the right time so maybe rather use those newfandangled sachets of soap and conditioner that you throw in when you load the dirty clothes.
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    I've never owned a top loading machine but I'm sure there must be a similar hack you can do with them as well.
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  6. #15
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    Hi Andy, I’ve been doing this for a few months now. My WM is old but still intelligent enough to recognize when the drum has sufficient water and to then stop filling from it’s designed supply :-D
    Do you think I could switch off the water supply to my WM all together or might that damage my machine?
    Thanks Cally

  7. #16
    Diamond Member AndyD's Avatar
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    I'm not an expert but I'd imagine all modern machines have sufficient safety built into them to prevent damage if there's insufficient water supply. It might throw up some kind of error code to let you know it's not happy but I'd just try it and see.
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  9. #17
    Diamond Member AndyD's Avatar
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    I got a message from a friend of mine the other day telling me his washing machine uses 300 litres per cycle on it's fastest wash program and asking if there's anything he can do to reduce it. I was pretty surprised, even though it's a big 13 kilo top loader I had no idea a washing machine could use so much water. I downloaded the manual for my AEG machine which is an 8 Kg front loader and it uses between 48 and 70 litres per cycle depending on what program you use. That's a damn big difference, even doubling my machine consumption to account for the fact one load in his machine would be 2 loads in mine it means his machine is still using 3 times the amount of water.....

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  10. #18
    Gold Member Houses4Rent's Avatar
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    A client of mine reduces the inlet flow valve to his washing machine to a minimum. When the machine takes in water he fills it though the soap drawer with a watering can which he says is pretty fast. It works well he says. Not sure about switching supply off all together though. I wrote to my machine manufacturer BOSCH about that, but so far had zero reply.

    300l sounds insane though.
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  12. #19
    Junior Member rh1's Avatar
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    I use my unfiltered wellpoint water. I have a small DAB pump with a pressure regulator connected to 4 x 1890 litre tanks. Initially we used a hosepipe to fill the washing machine, but I connected the WM directly to the to my wellpoint system. The trick is to let the water settle at least overnight (in the tanks) so that the clothes are not stained.

    My next step is to connect the pool pump and sand filter as well as my filtration system (already purchased) just did not have the time as yet
    Last edited by AndyD; 20-May-18 at 01:25 AM. Reason: By request

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