We just bought one of these high efficiency washers and I’m completely dissatisfied. I think this is due to the same reason many of you must love them (witness their popularity), and that it uses hardly any water but seeming a boatload of electricity in comparison.
Is this because in many states, electricity is dirt cheap (basically underpriced) and water is overpriced?
I’m in the northeast where we have the 2nd highest electric rates in the country. Water is cheap.
I’m aghast that a load of laundry takes nearly an hour (due to the feeble dragging through a small puddle of water) instead of sloshing around in a drum for 15 minutes. Do you people spend all weekend doing laundry? Or did we just get stuck with a defective POS (it’s a Whirlpool Cabrio).
I’ve never understood it either. Sometimes I have to wash my clothes twice in order to get them clean (with normal soiling). I don’t understand how that saves water.
Couldn’t tell you, we have an old school apartment style stacked washer and dryer. Drop the stuff in, toss in soap turn it on and ignore it until it beeps that it is done. Cleans just fine even thought it is a fairly grumpy 15 years old and occasionally has to be argumentative if you want to do a tiny delicate load [I think something in the controller is broken, but as long as it does large heavy loads it runs fine]
You say it seems to use a buttload more electricity, but have you done anything to actually measure that? From what I have read the machines themselves use less electricity and you also save energy by using less hot water.
Our washer does take like 50 minutes a load, but if we are doing three or four loads in a row it is usually the dryer that is the bottleneck anyways.
The irony there is that the barely wet clothes take 30 minutes to dry, so the bottleneck is now the washer. But in warmer weather we (gasp) actually use a clothesline and save the electricity there. Fact of the matter is that I’d rather use more water and have fast washes. In order to wash my kids sweatpants ehich get really dirty I had to wash them twice for a total of 100 minutes. I cannot spend my entire weekend doing laundry.
How anyone ever accepted this is beyond me.
Sounds like the POS is working as expected. I’m sending it back to bestbuy and getting a older model that actually cleans clothes quickly.
Yes, I do spend all weekend doing laundry. O.K., not really, but I do spend a good portion of Sunday, so I know that I can’t schedule activities or plan to see a movie on Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, I’m in an apartment, and at the mercy of the machines installed by my landlord, unless I feel like spending the afternoon at the laundromat. At least the HE apartment machines are free.
Humm - I love my HE washer - it’s an LG. I find it actually gets my clothing much CLEANER than my old stackable did. As in, clothing that was in the charity pile got washed and came out so well it’s now back in my closet. Boo charity, yay me!
Are you using an HE specific soap? I don’t know why that would make a difference, but I suppose it might.
As to timing - well, yes, it does take a long time for a load to wash, but I just throw loads in while I’m doing other stuff - cooking dinner, knitting, etc. I mean, it’s not as though you have to sit and watch it wash.
I will note that the ‘Hand Wash’ setting also did a fabulous job of my bras. I test drove one first as the things are stupidly expensive and I didn’t want to trash them - the whole drum just gently swooshed back and forth. Worked like a charm.
I live in a rural wasteland. The water here has to be pumped from a well that is expensive to maintain, and then has to go through a softener which was expensive to buy and requires about a ton (really) of salt every year.
I’m not sure why you would do laundry all weeked - I just toss a load in before I go to bed and set it to start in 5 hours. Then, when I wake up, I toss it the dryer while I’m getting ready for work. I don’t have kids - so I definitely have less laundry than you, but I don’t need to do it every night and a lot of the time I’m doing a lot less than a full load.
I hear ya…my 19 year old Whirlpool does a load of wash about 3 times that of these “HE” washers. I really wonder if there is any savings…if I have to run the machine 3 times to do the same load as my old machine.
It’s my understanding that the HE specific soaps are designed to get more suds for a given amount of water than older laundry soaps, because HE washers use less water. It might help with the OP’s problem of thinking the washer’s just giving his clothes a “feeble dragging through a small puddle of water.”
HE washers are supposed to use less WATER? Are you friggen kidding me? All this time we’ve been bitching about the water use and it really isn’t supposed to be using this much? I thought HE washers were supposed to save electricity, not water!
I use the smallest load size and still every load I do needs an extra spin to get all the damn water out. Without the extra spin, there’s so much extra water that my dryer wont even run because of the weight. The damn thing runs for over an hour with the extra spin.
Piece of crap has gotta be defective. I hate it. My boyfriend hates it. It’s too late to return it. I’m so tempted to see if my mom wants to swap washers with me. I’d rather use my mom’s 15+ year old washer than my piece of shit.
Oh, it also unbalances on about 75% of the loads, no matter how carefully I balance the clothes.
This is generally what I do. I don’t quite get the “all laundry must be done on one day only and must be done when electricity is expensive”. If it’s done in the early morning, you throw it in the dryer (if needed) and go on with your day. Do it a few times a week and you’re good.
We have a Frigidaire (Someone told us was a rebranding of another company. I don’t know if that was correct since the mounting bracket they gave us isn’t quite right for it.) It works wonderfully. It also has, hands down, the best user interface on a complex large appliance I’ve ever seen. Everything makes sense and is intuitive.
HE washers use far less water and electricity than old-style vertical tub machines.
When we got rid of the newish top-loaders that came with our house and replaced them with HE, our water bill dropped $40 per month. Also, the HE washer’s fast spin speed means the dryer has to run a lot less.
Clothes came out so much cleaner that we actually re-washed everything we had.
If your HE machine is leaving clothes anything much more than damp at the end of a cycle, there’s something wrong with it - for starters, check that the drain line is not clogged and that it’s run properly - pay particular attention to the height of the discharge.
IME, it’s absurdly hard to make a frontloader go out of balance and not spin properly short of putting in one bathroom rug with nothing else to balance it. In five years, I’ve never had an imbalance or had the machine leave clothes even close to wet.
It’s made by Electrolux. More than just vacuum cleaners now, Big E is the European equivalent to Whirlpool, making appliances under several brand names including White-Westinghouse, Husqvarna, Poulan, AEG, Eureka, Gibson and Kelvinator.
Did you switch from a non HE toploader to an HE frontloader? Because I think the top vs front might be the reason for the difference you see. I have an HE toploader- it uses less water than my old toploader ( but probably more than a frontloader) but the wash time is the same as the old toploader
I don’t devote much time to laundry. I throw a load in in the morning, take it out a few hours later and throw it in the dryer, I don’t really care how long the washer takes or even notice much.
Congodwarf- you got a top loader? It’s the front loaders that save water.
Waterj2- HE detergents don’t make suds. Sudsy detergents in a front loader are a bad thing. On some models, sudsy detergents will ruin the tub bearings.
Perhaps, but my first guess was that the thread was going to be about how wonderful women think it is when a man does housework…“HE washers” did strike a bit awkward, but not enough to clue me in.