Hot water dissolves lead more quickly than cold water and is therefore more likely to contain greater amounts of lead. Never use water from the hot water tap for drinking, cooking, or making baby formula.

  • cecilkorik@piefed.ca
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    2 months ago

    It mostly depends on where you are in the world and what the wiring is designed for. 220V heating elements are abundantly powerful enough to heat water of any temperature to a useful temperature within the early stages of a wash cycle, and dishwashers with such heating elements are usually designed for cold water, for consistency, because the water in the pipes is always room temperature at first anyway. In places where the dishwasher is built for, and will be connected to 110V electrical supply, they will need the water to be pre-heated (including running the hot tap at the sink where they are plumbed from). If you read the manual, it almost certainly says so.

    No matter what voltage they are designed for, they are almost exactly the same in all other respects. You might assume your dishwasher is smart enough to know what temperature the water is and that its magic electronics can run the water long enough or run the heater long enough or do something to make sure it gets to the specified temperature at some point before the cycle is considered done, however in basically all cases it does not, despite all the marketing bullshit trying to tell you how smart they are, they are actually very simple machines and they operate on nothing but very simple, factory-designed timers and cycles in all but the most esoteric designs. They are not smart enough to properly heat the water and almost none of them even have any sensor to detect the temperature or control the heating element in any useful way besides hopefully making sure it doesn’t burn your house down. They work because the combination of the heating element and the water supply together are enough to eventually make the water hot enough to wash properly. On 220V it’s easier to specify the use of the cold water because that is actually a pretty consistent temperature and the necessary heating times can then be set pretty reliably at the factory. On 110V you have to use hot water, and you have to make sure it’s actually hot in the pipes when the machine starts filling. The latter is obviously less desirable, but it’s the only way to get a proper wash out of 110V dishwashers. It’s a crapshoot, North Americans don’t generally know or do this, and the quality of the wash suffers accordingly. But they simply don’t make them any other way. Maybe they should change. But they haven’t. This is what we’re stuck with.

    So basically if you have 110V dishwasher you need to hook it up to hot water and make sure the water gets hot before it fills if you expect them to wash properly. That’s just the reality of how they’re designed. 220V = cold water, 110V = hot water. That’s basically universal in the regions where each power standard is used. Unless you take a European/Asian 220V dishwasher and run the 220V wiring to hook it up in North America intentionally, but nobody actually does that, and you’re not going to find it was done in your house by surprise.