Never seen nor heard of either.
Americans have clothes dryers, so don’t put away linens damp.
So now I’m totally confused…does the airing cupboard have anything to do with heating water for your bathroom shower, or is the tank in there just to aid in drying linens?
Most American homes have a washer and dryer for doing laundry, and any linens that come out of the dryer are dry…they don’t need to be put away damp. If they didn’t dry the first time, you run another cycle till they are dry! Even line-dried sheets aren’t put away damp. And since nearly all homes are centrally heated, linens stay dry and don’t get musty.
We heat the house and all our water with the hot water heater. The tank holds a bunch of hot water ready for use so that it doesn’t have to run all of the time.
At least in my house, the tank is for hot water for the whole house. This may or may not be used for central heating as well - my house doesn’t have central heating, it has electric storage heaters instead (which were put in later - before that there was no heating other than a couple of electric radiators and the open fireplace downstairs. And this house was only built in the 1960s!)
A typical UK heating and hot water system (aka ‘central heating’) comprises:
Water-filled radiators in each room
An insulated cylindrical hot water tank, located in the ‘airing cupboard’, containing a heat exchanger pipe coil and sometimes an electric immersion heater element as a backup.
A wall-mounted gas boiler to heat the water.
A valve, controlled by a thermostat and/or programmable timer
The boiler heats water and runs it through the heat exchanger in the tank, heating the water there.
When there is a demand for room heating, the thermostat/timer switches the flow of heated water away from the tank and into the water-filled radiators. The tank stays hot because it is insulated.
Domestic hot water is drawn from the hot water tank. If the system is set up for hot water priority (the norm), the drop in temperature provokes it to switch back to heating the tank again.
The hot water in the tank is not used to heat the house, except, I suppose, the accidental heating that occurs in the airing cupboard.
Some houses have other arrangements for room heating and a tank with just an electric immersion heater.
Some houses have no tank, just a boiler that heats domestic hot water (supposedly)instantaneously on demand.
You have to have the hot water storage tank somewhere, and the heat that inevitably leaks out of it might as well do some good by heating up the airing cupboard. Washing that hasn’t quite dried on the clothes line outside, or damp towels from the bathroom all benefit from being in there.
I gather many American communities have a prejudice against hanging washing on the line. No such stigma attaches to it here - why would you use electricity, which costs money, to do something the wind and the sun will do for nothing?
It’s not so much a prejudice against line-drying as a preference for the convenience of machine drying. Line drying requires, if not a sunny day, at least a dry one, and the time to hang everything up, check back on it and take it down. I absolutely love the scent of line-dried sheets…but line-dried towels are scratchier, and take forever to dry. Line-dried clothing, except for t-shirts, undies and jeans, needs a touch-up with the iron more often, it seems. I can come home from work, toss a load of clothes in the washer while I eat dinner, throw them in the dryer as I head to bed, and have a nice basket of dry clothes in the morning. And don’t let’s get started about line-drying in the wintertime…outside is uncomfortable, and indoors…well, I have clotheslines in my basement, but it takes forever for anything to dry down there, and then it all smells kind of basementy. And clothes tend to fade from the sunlight.
Some communities (typical upscale subdivisions) have rules (or covenants) about everything from what color you can paint your home to what can be parked in your driveway, and in some, outside clothes drying is specifically prohibited.
To clarify we have a hot press/airing cupboard and a clothes dryer. The tank in the hot press provides hot water for the taps and used to do so for the shower but now our shower is electric. We use the clothes dryer when it is raining but when it’s not we line dry our clothes. The reason I asked the question is that my gf was looking at the floor plan of an Irish house and asked what the little room was.
While I understand the heating system described above, I’m not sure I understand how the airing closet actually functions. How wet is the stuff you store there? Is is stacked? I would imagine that mildew would start to form in the middle of stacks of damp towels in a nice, warm, humid environment before that section of the stack actually begin to dry.
Clothes lines: my wife always bugs me to set one up, but I think it would look tacky in our neighborhood, and I’m certain any clothes would be shat upon by the numerous birds we have.
Even for a clothes drier, it’s not very good to over dry your goods. If you have an automatic moisture sensing system, use it, and trust it. If you dry your clothes to the point that they’re drier than the normal ambient air, then you’ve gone too far.
If I understand this airing cupboard system correctly it sounds like incidental heat from the hot water tank is put to use to dry the linens.
I know in the US many people try to reduce this incidental heat loss from their hot water tanks by wrapping it in insulation. Even the pipes leading from it are often wrapped.
I don’t know if this is true in older US houses, for example I don’t think the tank in the house I grew up in had an insulated tank or pipes but as energy costs have increased more people do this kind of thing.
I think I understand: a radiator system for heat, a storage tank for hot water (with an electronic heating element for backup) and a gas fired boiler to serve them all (with boiler/radiator water kept seperate from tap water through the exchange pipes in the tank).
Because a system like this is mindbogglingly complex (at least to me anyway) a key element to it is a central closet with slatted shelves (sort of like the benches in a sauna?) where linens and towels are stored to aid in drying / preventing dampness and mildew.
In my house (single story, slab foundation) there is a gas furnace and gas water heater both located in the same room. The furnace sucks air, heats it, and pushes it through the vent system. The water heater heats 40 gallons of water to 121F and maintains that temperature (or attempts to) as hot water is used. Because the furnace and water heater is in the same room and the furnace is a forced air system, that room is usually warm and dry but extremely dusty and dirty, we clean it out as often as possible or else the dust starts recirculating in the house and everything gets pretty nasty.
I guess my questions are:
Doesn’t using a boiler jack up the gas bill in winter?
Even with the backup element in the water tank what is the average availability of consistantly hot water?
Is the boiler water standard municipal (or well) water or a closed system with treated water to help with effeciency?
So really you basically have fresh(ish), warm, dry towels pretty much anytime you want them? Sweet.
Speaking of freshish towels, is seems recycling towels would be facilitated by having a room sized dryer available. Is that common? IME it’s kind of mixed over here with the women folk usually dictating whether towels are reused or not. Is there such a stigma against recycled towels or are we just weird?
If steam heat is more common than forced air then are there similar issues with mold / dust / alergies in general?
Don’t know much about Americans do you. Of course we do stuff as wastefully as possible, take a look at the classic example of American cars versus Asian and European cars. If it’s not a gas guzzling land boat or SUV then we don’t want it. Make 'em big, make 'em loud, make 'em dirty; just like all things great in this country.
In my experience, it’s never more than just a tiny bit damp-ish - maybe even just residual moisture from steam ironing. The airing cupboard renders - and keeps - it very dry.
Most hot water tanks in the UK are insulated (in fact they come with hard foam insulation as standard now - you can’t buy them without) - the airing cupboard is still a warm place though, because no insulation is ever perfect.
I use mine for proving bread and drying mushrooms.
Well, yes, but it can get cold here, so you have to do something.
It depends on the way the system is configured - I have really good insulation on the tank, so the boiler heats it whenever it drops below a certain temperature - it will stay hot like that for a very long time - I very seldom hear the boiler kick in to heat the tank, except after hot water has been drawn. I don’t use the electric immersion heater at all, except maybe if the boiler is being serviced or something.
The circulation water in the boiler, radiators and heat-exchanger is pressurised and is just tap water (there’s a valve for topping it up next to the boiler. The plumber who installed the system did add some kind of corrosion inhibitor when he initially filled it.
They’re not really that warm - the airing cupboard is just warm-ish, not hot.
The credit squeeze is going to make a lot of people retrench - here and over there. I’ve often thought that one of biggest differences between our societies is that we are still locked into that wartime make-do-and-mend mindset which at least our parents’ generation was brought up on, if not ours (and rationing only finished seven years before I was born)
'parently in the British Isles, although my flat in Glasgow doesn’t have one.
They don’t exist in Spain unless some Brit put one in his retirement house. Then again, during most of the year most of Spain has the kind of climate where you can dry clothes by shaking them a bit at the window (only a “slight” exaggeration).
But that’s the thing - you don’t. We recently paid a bit of money to switch from a godawful shitty old gas heater/hot tank+immersion/cold tank system to a tankless combi system. Besides bringing our central heating and hot water system up to a level that was probably regarded as state of the art in mainland europe roughly thirty years ago, this also let us tear out one large hot water tank, one large cold water tank, one small cold water tank, and approx. twenty metres of piping. The one downside is that instead of a nice cosy airing cupboard we now just have a cupboard, but that’s trivial compared to the benefits.
Darn, I’ve often though that visiting Great Britain would be nice. The culture, the climate, the mashed up green chick peas and curry on the fries. You almost had me there with the purple mushrooms and a promise of warm, fresh dry towels and linens. But if the mushrooms don’t stay purple after cooking and the towels and linens are not really that warm, I guess I’ll have to settle for Puerto Rico. At least there I can eat fresh mango and avacado until I burst in a splash of orange and green humanity.
At the bottom of the hot press there are huge jars with fermenting elderberries - it’s nice and warm for wine making.
As a child I had something my friend didn’t have - a hot press. We must have been around eight and she came over especially to see ths device. I flung open the door triumphantly to which she remarked - that’s an airing cupboard - where’s this hot press thing. Drat! Hot press was my Irish mum’s name for airing cupboard… add to list of mum words … turnscrew etc