tl/dr portion: So after last year’s mess with the 9+ year old front loader not getting fixed until about the fifth time the service tech came out (we had a service contract on the thing), I told my husband that we are not spending another dime on this washer.
It took me several months to get Sears to quit calling me to try to wheedle me into buying another service contract.
Anyway, after fixing two separate things that weren’t the problem, backording another part, waiting 2 weeks, having them install it and finding it to be NONFUNCTIONING (and then somehow acquiring a replacement that same day, as in WTF with the 2 weeks), it was finally working.
Until yesterday. I got home just as my son was discovering a thin later of water all over the laundry room floor. We cleaned it up, my husband got home and partially dismantled the thing to see where the water came from, could not tell, so he tried running a small load of cleaning rags.
This resulted in the washer stopping halfway through the cycle and flashing lights at us (same behavior as last year). He tried restarting it. It stopped again (and the door is latched shut and won’t open so buh-bye rags unless we take a very therapeutic crowbar to it… which we would, if we owned a crowbar.
/tl/dr portion
Anyway, the tl/dr story is: we need to replace our washer quickly. The old one is a front loader, 10 years old and lots of problems in its life, so we’d be throwing good money after bad in trying to repair it. We’re strongly leaning toward a top-loading HE machine. We’re also strongly leaning against going with Sears given the mess with the incompetent service people last time around (it was not a Sears employee, it was some company I’d never heard of that had the contract).
Samsung makes one with a built-in utility sink in the top. I’ve never had a utility sink in the laundry. How useful is that, really?
Anyone have any other thoughts on the topic? Any brands to get or avoid? Any love or hate for the top-loading high efficiency machines?