It’s nothing to do with ring circuits or fused plugs. The UK was just slow to adopt RCDs and very conservative about bathroom wiring regulations. It went from not really requiring RCDs at all, to requiring them on every circuit. A modern UK installation (post 2000s) is likely to use RCBOs (combined breaker and RCD) on each circuit.
Ireland, which uses the exact same sockets and allows (but doesn’t always use) rings has required RCDs since the 1970s. However the bathroom regulations remain just as strict.
Ring circuits are just like a power bus fed from both ends. They’re protected by an RCD in modern British installations and would be on a 32amp breaker. The plug contains a fuse rated usually 3, 10 or 13 amps and these are mandatory in all plugs and devices that fit a UK or Irish socket outlet. So your human protection is the RCD, your building wiring is protected by the breaker and the flexible cable on the appliance is protected by the local fuse in the plug.
There’s just generally a very conservative approach taken to bathroom wiring and there isn’t really a technical argument that makes the requirements any different. That’s just how it is. They’ve always also required shuttered sockets (going back to the 1940s) and grounding has been absolute and universal. You won’t find any ungrounded sockets as they don’t make them and a 3rd pin is always required to open the socket’s three pin receptacles, whether you need a ground or not. Some designs actually require the ground pin (longer) to enter first followed by equal pressure on the line and neutral. Older designs are opened only by the ground pin. Wall mounted light switches are also generally not allowed in bathroom areas (unless very large and located 2m+ from the wet areas). Typically light switches are located outside bathrooms.
In Ireland, you’ll tend to find the washing machine in the kitchen in smaller and certain eras of homes. However it’s far from universal or the default place for it. A lot of homes have dedicated utility rooms, which might be off the kitchen. If there’s space, like houses in less built up areas, these can get pretty large and would often also contain things like a full height or chest freezer and so on.
Most recent era apartments also tend to have a dedicated laundry space. Calling it a laundry room would often be a bit much, but they’re usually a large laundry closet that can accommodate the two machines and usually located off a hallway, not the kitchen.
The garage is another common place for washers and dryers.
Also like the description of Hawaii, you’ll sometimes find washing machines placed semi outdoor locations like enclosed and covered yards or in sheds or utility rooms built next to houses. The climate here, especially on the coasts (where most people live) hardly ever gets to freezing temperature. You might get a touch of grass frost now and then but temperatures cold enough to worry plumbing are so rare that nobody would think twice about locating it an unheated area. This may be different in parts of Britain that get a tiny bit colder, but if it happens here I would suspect it’s something you might also encounter in southern and southwestern coastal England too, although you’d have to verify that.
In Spain it wasn’t unusual to have the laundry located on the balcony of apartments. They often have very large balconies, often with enclosed spaces at either end and built in storage. However as you tended to dry clothes on the balcony on racks, it made sense to have the laundry machines in a closet at the end. We had a washer and a dryer out on the balcony, neatly built into a big closet with a pair of full louver doors. At one side of the balcony there was a louvered section which was used for drying laundry and so on and wasn’t visible from the street. The rest of the balcony was used for dining mostly but it wrapped the full way around the entire apartment and was actually really nice and useful outdoor space. Our bedrooms opened onto it too. So you could just open large doors and bring the outside world in and you’d awnings and shutters to keep it out when it was hot.
The AC units were also hidden in that balcony area with the louvers.
Spanish climate also varies from regions that get pretty cold winters to ones that are warm all year around, so that tends to influence laundry setups. In the north or Spain high spin washers and dryers were much more common and you had to think about frost protection. In southern Spain using a dryer would be absolute madness as it’s usually perfect drying weather and there are absolutely no hang ups about putting a rack on a balcony or outdoors.
When I lived in France the location of washers was fairly varied too. In houses it was usually the garage, or in dedicated laundry space, or in warmer climes even semi outdoors too - like just off the backyard in a small shed or whatever. It’s climate dependent though as you’d find they impossible in parts of France that get cold winters, but down on the Mediterranean coast and even the southern parts of the west, it’s similar to Spain or Italy in terms of climate - never really gets seriously cold. Most of the time the weather is idyllic.
In apartments in France they were wherever they fitted - that could be a kitchen, a closet, under the bathroom (in a console), stuck in the bathroom etc. The top loading, tall and narrow tub varieties were common in old apartments in city centres as they take up relatively less floor space and can be squeezed into tight areas, yet do the same job as a front loader. They even had dryers in the same top loading format. Those machines are available in the Irish and the UK market but they’re very very rarely purchased, yet in France I would say they’ve 25%-30% of the market. Older apartments in cities like Paris can be extremely squeezed in, much like what you might encounter in Manhattan, but often with far grander exterior architecture and much, much older.
In general in Europe the locations are very varied but you’ll find the front loader almost absolutely dominant and the top loaders are also a H-axis drum and effectively just a tall narrow front loader with a loading hatch in the drum instead of a porthole door.
Also front loader capacity in Europe varies due to depth of the machines. They may look the same from the front but compact models are far shallower and are often found in apartments, especially the kinds of places tourists rent. So you’ll get reports of tiny Italian or French washers but these often aren’t what your typical household has. Full capacity European machines have no issue devouring a large hamper of bath towels in a single load. They just use deeper and sometimes tilted drums along with ladle lifters and/or recirculating pumps to ensure a good result with a full drum. I still find a lot of Americans seem to think that machines need a lot of empty drum space, which is true if you’ve an agitator washer that has to suspend the clothes in water to move them. However a drum based machine will have no issue being stuffed full as the water moves through them as the drum turns and there’s just no issues with turn over.
The one thing I would say though is even big capacity European dryers in standard cabinets are a bit too squashed. Our full capacity Miele T2 does a fine job drying, but if you load it full of towels they will expand a bit and come out a tad squished if you don’t remove them quickly after the cycle ends. In general those heat pump dryers seem to handle big loads no problem at all though as they’re not all that hot, the drying largely being about forcing moisture out of the recirculating air rather than just heat.
I’d have to say since I got it my clothes are in way better condition and last much longer as the drying process is just much more gentle and involves no extreme temps.
As for the British being correct, I wouldn’t agree that the kitchen is an ideal location for laundry. It’s not gross but it’s just annoying to have it there. Washing machines and dryers make noise, so they’ll always be a bit annoying if you’ve dining in the kitchen and if you’ve a dryer in a kitchen you can even suck in kitchen odours (and vented dryers in kitchens weren’t unusual).
The logic was the kitchen had plumbing and usually a backdoor with access to the garden. Beyond that it isn’t really that sensible a location.
The other thing that is quite interesting, and I would assume this applies on the UK too, was that houses build before the 1950s here in Ireland tended to have impractical kitchen and laundry architecture. I read a report about it once and it was quite simply down to the fact that laundry and cooking was done by women and very few women were involved in architecture at the time. So designs tended to reflect the notions of some pipe smoking guy born in the 19th century who paid little attention to the practical aspects of what went on in kitchens and laundry areas. A lot of 1920s and 30s homes here tended to grossly undersize the kitchens and have no dedicated laundry space, yet they would put a lot of emphasis into spacious living rooms and dining rooms. Many of those homes would have long since have been modernised and now feature bigger, brighter, show piece kitchen and dining areas.
As the century went on you see the emphasis focus more and more on the kitchen and the Bauhaus and modernist designs, which had a big female input began to appear. Kitchens became bigger and more practical and then became major show pieces, eventually becoming the centre piece of most homes and very much part of the living space. So there’s been a lot of social impact that tracks not just changes in technology but the empowerment and change of role of women, the role of men too, with sharing or household duties and guys being far more involved in raising kids and keeping house and the transformation of cooking from an out of sight utilitarian thing into more of a lifestyle and fun thing that’s at the middle of a home. That accelerated in the 60s, 70s and at this stage the kitchen is really the middle of life and cooking is a more of hobby than a chore - hence the endless line up of cookery shows on tv and men having no issues getting wrapped up in what Mary Berry is doing on the Great British Bake Off etc etc
If you go back to Edwardian or older homes the kitchens in large homes would have had servants even in relatively middle class homes owned by the local doctor or a lawyer or whatever. It was out of sight out of mind and meals appeared on the table either delivered by a maid, a butler or a hard working home making wife. That all disappeared in the 1900s with raising living standards and income equality hiring servants on low wages became impossible and the role of women and men became more and more equal. The divides became less present and the kitchen became everyone’s space and cooking and cleaning tasks are shared and supported by tech.
So I would generally say the big, modernist European kitchens with open plan and show off appliances tends to be about that social change and a growth towards equality as much if not more than to do with changes of tech for appliances and construction systems. You’re also seeing that change towards people purchasing appliances with all the enthusiasm they’d put into buying a car. It’s about the specs and the tech and the designs. Compare that with the 1950s sexist old “buy your wife a Hoover” type adverts...
Anyway! That’s my take on European washer and kitchen social geography lol
[this post was last edited: 2/19/2020-04:31]
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