I love my crappy washing machine!

My previous washing machine was a Maytag Neptune and cost me like $1400 and the matching (very ordinary) dryer was almost as much to make a matching set.

That washing machine was pitched to me at the latest thing, that it would save me work, energy and water, and I would love it. The fact is that it was a nightmare. I would have to stand there and run the washer through two or three extra complete cycles to get the soapy water out. Yeah, Mr. Salesman, it uses less water. If you want soapy clothes to stick in your dryer.

When I sold the house with that infernal thing in it, one of the conditions on the buyer was that they had to accept the appliances. Good riddance. At that point I vowed to only buy the LEAST EFFICIENT washer in the future, and I did.

I love my $199 Roper that I got at Lowes. The fact that it got one of the lowest ratings on the EPA sticker only sealed the deal. Plus, I got a dealio because they were out of the washer they were advertising at $199 so the nice lady at Lowes gave me the Roper that had a larger capacity than the advertised model for the same price!

And I just love it. I can spin the wheel either way and pop into any cycle I want and after almost a year I haven’t broken the damn thing. I am a laundry weirdo and I love the control. And I am sure I am using about the same amount of water or even less, but I am spending way less time to get my clothes spotless and suds-free.

And thank you, Consumer Reports, for rating Roper as the most reliable brand in your latest customer survey of top loaders. And, well, yeah, since Roper only makes low-end models you would expect them to beat fancier brands in reliability across their range.

I guess my point to the board, is that simple can often be better. I can now walk through Best Buy and not suffer washer envy. The only downside is that when I see some poor benighted couple in that place, and they are about to go in to hock to buy the same type of POS, I want to speak up and say NO! NO! Don’t do it you fools!

I love my washer!

Stop it, you shattering my dreams, I want one of those cool front load matching pairs with matching pedestals and matching $1400 price tags.
Stop belittling my dream.

Why do I bet this is the model that has giving people in Wisconsin a lot of problems? The television stations have been advocates for the people, so they get something done. One person gets taking care of and they get more calls.

Do you realize that Roper is engineered and manufactured by Whirlpool?

That Roper sounds like the cheapo kenmores that are so nice and reliable, yet energy/water hogs. But hey, if it lasts 30 years…

Its what I’ll buy when the time comes.

Fry

When we were looking for a new washer and dryer, we thought about going energy efficient for mucho bucks, but realized that just the two of us, with no kids and no particularly dirty habits (clotheswise, anyway) and a clothesline in the laundry room were already fairly energy efficient. I’m not too worried about it. Our basic machines do all I need them to do.

Not to rain on your parade, but those front-loading washing machines need detergent that’s specially formulated for them - a low-sudsing kind that prevents that crazy soap problem. And they spin so fast, I always imagine my clothes in there are in training to be astronauts. Very cool, once I bought new detergent.

But never mind, I feel your pain. I just moved into a new place (that’s how I now know about the high-efficiency detergent thing) and the dishwasher is all new and badass. So badass, in fact, that I hate it. The bottom rack has a huge swath of space with no prongs sticking up to hold plates. The top rack is the same way, lots of shelves with no prongs. How the heck am I supposed to put plates and glasses in there without having them fall all over the place? I actually can’t fit as many dishes inside it as I could with my old-fashioned dishwasher that had the big unusable space in the middle of the bottom rack for the spray arm. :frowning:

That reminds me. I have to go to the @$&%$ing laundrymat this weekend.

Yes, I used the special detergent slop. But that is a ripoff too. You get the same results with regular detergent just using 1/3 of the dosage and save a lot of moolah. 2/3’s in fact. :wink: I measured the outflow of these washers and it is less than 3 gallons per load. Simple dilution formula should tell you this is not a way to get things soap free, no matter the detergent concentration.

And here’s the thing. They could have made those things rinse decently if they had just put a few more sprays into the spin cycle. It’s like they don’t even care, and why should they? You will buy it again and again. Why doesn’t somebody make an “open systems” washer where I can decide everything from my computer via Ethernet? Let me decide how long the spin cycle is and how many times it should spray rinse water. I would pay a lot more than $200 for that and would save a King’s Ransom in water and gas bills along with it.

And good luck with your “Neptune” style washers, folks. It is no wonder that they lurk at the bottom of CR’s reliability survey. When I left my Neptune set in the old house I told the buyer “good luck with that, you can have it”. He responded “looks perfectly fine to me!”. He called me about three months later- “Yeah, you were right aobut that.”

Hey, don’t blame ME because you bought a front loader named after some undersea god. Just make sure you dis them when your CR survey comes. :wink:

I wish I even had a machine to bitch about. :frowning: :wink: