This is a timely thread. We just decided to buy a new washer & dryer (I know, I know...look for a used one). My dad is an electrician and just installed a energy meter in our house yesterday (or "smart" meter has a fatal error so it's not recording or doesn't show us what it's recording, and has been like this since we moved into our house in August, but they're in no rush to fix it, one guy told me that they'll just back estimate our usage, the other guy says he's sure it's still collecting our energy usage we just can't see it...u can believe I'm gonna fight 'em if they give me an insanely high bill when they finally get it fixed...but I digress).
Anyway back to the laundry...the meter my dad hooked up shows that our dryer is using about 6500 watts compared to the lower wattage of the newer ones. our dryer which came with the house is older (20 years?) and takes about 2.5 cycles, yes that's right about 2.5hrs to dry the clothes. There's heat coming out and it's spinning, there is good airflow from the vents etc, so we can't figure out what's wrong with it. With the meter attached it shows us that its running at 6500 Watts, so more than the newer ones, in addition to the fact that it takes over twice as long to dry stuff it's costing us money. The washer, though seemingly solid is really hit and miss in terms of how wet the clothes are when they come out, sometimes they are soaking other times they are fine we can't find any rhyme or reason to it.
We decided to take advantage of the boxing "week" sales at home depot and buy a mid-range, well reviewed set which will be delivered in a month and allow us to take advantage of the 6-months no interest payment plan.
Of course, I woke up this morning with a big purchase hangover, which I never used to get before MMM. All day so far I've been questioning our decision, should we just stick with the old one, tear them apart, try and fix them, or continue to keep my eye out of a well priced used set. Egad!!!
Anyway, the point of this rant is that in my old house I had a front loader, was fine, bit stinky but we were rural so we pulled water from the creek so I'm sure that had something to do with it, but generally my clothes were pretty clean and we hadn't had any repair issues with it since it's purchase in 2006 (lots of laundry, diapers etc so it's well used) This one at the new house is top loader and generally doesn't get things as clean. I'm seeing a fair amount of comments in MMM and elsewhere that people generally aren't happy with the front loaders. What gives? What types of problems are people seeing with the front loaders?