Laundry Issues

When I went to visit my sister over her birthday weekend, she told our family a hilarious story about hot water in the toilet. Basically, when some plumbing work was done on the house, somehow some pipes were switched, and the toilet was hooked up to the hot water pipes. Consequently, every time she or N had to use the facilities, it was quite comfortable. (No chilly toilet seat in winter, right?) Only, for whatever reason, it took them a while to notice the mistake. I believe the toilet might have been steaming one day - and it tipped them off.

Well, we don't have a steamy toilet bowl, but we do have some laundry issues. I did three loads of laundry yesterday. The first was a dark load, so I set it to cold. When I went down to the basement a half hour later to load the laundry into the dryer, I noticed all the clothes felt warm. (Usually I forget about the laundry and everything turns cold and clammy - moving the wet clothes to the dryer is an unpleasant experience - kinda like accidentally stepping in a small puddle on the bathroom floor when you've just put on clean socks.) "That's funny," I thought. I checked the washer. It was indeed set to cold, and our display says, "Cold Rinse". So we should have been good.

I shrugged, started loading whites into the machine, and went to set the washer to hot. This time I decided to test things and stuck my hand in the flow. The water was (you can guess) anything but. So I clicked it over to cold - and the stream immediately heated up to the correct temperature.

This wouldn't really bother me (I mean, it's easy enough to reverse washing instructions) except that I have no control over the rinse cycle - it is ALWAYS going to be hot - and my brand new supply of Fuzzibunz cloth diapers very clearly state they must be pre-rinsed, and then rinsed after washing in COLD.

PS I am aware of how long it has been since we had our basement plumbing work done. Why am I just noticing this now?