Has anyone had experience with these? Both washing and drying functions are contained in one unit; it is not the same thing as a stackable unit. I have a small laundry nook which probably only fits apartment size units. I also don’t have a laundry vent so a no venting unit is a plus.
Do the combo units work well in both washing and drying? I already experience a long dry time due to lack of venting (or I did until my dryer started smoking :eek: ). Does anyone have any specific combo units to recommend?
I have a Miele washer/dryer - the washer is fine but the dryer takes a little longer. The guy I talked to said this is for 3 reasons:
- a washer/dryer combo dryer is not as good as a standalone dryer
- if you go straight from washing to drying the machine is still wet and needs to work harder
- you can wash more clothes than you can dry in the same size machine. So if your washer is at full capacity it will be overfull if you go straight to drying.
It’s not a big deal to me as I line dry most stuff and only have the dryer for emergencies. But if I wanted to dry every load I wouldn’t go for a washer/dryer combo - too much of a time waster.
I got one of those Ariston Italian-made jobs. I think the maximum load is something like 2 kilos, not too much. It takes forever, hours to do a load, even though I use the timed drying cycle. I have one of those drying racks in the spare bedroom. It is also rather loud, so it lives in the kitchen.
On the other hand, it is a neat bit of engineering. It has no hot-air vent, the heat going down the drain with water it sucks in for that purpose. It has saved me a lot of time going to the laundry.
A friend of ours had one - think it was a Miele. They were very happy with the small size and not needing external venting. They did not like that it took three to four hours per load, and that a load has to be completely done before you could start the next, as opposed to regular machines where one load would be drying while the other is washing.
We have an LG. It’s got about a full laundry basket capacity. We got it in October. The drying cycle takes forever to get things really dry, but the high spin plus some heat from the dryer means that clothes hung up dry pretty fast. I generally wash, run through the drying cycle for thirty minutes, and then hang up. Works okay, and is 100000x better than lugging everything to the laundromat. Also it’s cheaper.
We’ve got a small apartment, and no place for vents.
ETA: one really annoying thing- if you have pets, the condensation dryer doesn’t take pet fur off nearly as effectively as a vented dryer.
We had one and it worked well as long as we treated it as two separate appliances (rather than having it switch to drying mode automatically). The washing machine spins so fast that the clothes tend to get clumped together and need a quick shake out. Also, the drying capacity is typically only half the washing capacity, so the clothes need to be dried in two separate loads (or half dried in the machine, half air dried).
My daughter had one in her tiny apartment (no venting) and loved it. She really didn’t care much how long it took, and like not having to move the clothes.