In the fall of 2018, our house ended up with a broken boiler and thus no heat and no hot water.
Without heat: we managed for 3 months with a fireplace and half a dozen electric heaters.
Without hot water: we only lasted 3 days.
I came up with an idea just crazy enough to work: run the cold water from the clothes washer to an electric water heater, then run the heater’s hot water backwards into the hot tap for washer, and power it by plugging into the clothes dryer outlet.
And it worked. And it stayed that way for several months, haha. Turns out, 1) clothes dryers and water heaters use about the same power – 220V 30A, and 2) there aren’t any check valves in home plumbing so almost any water outlet can be an inlet in the right circumstances.
