Search the Community

My wife takes her laundry seriously. This means when our machine acts up, it's a crisis and I'm the guy who gets the call to put things right again. In the past five years, more or less, we have gone through three machines. The first one was a Maytag front loader. That one worked well for many years but then ran into mechanical issues. The cost of repairs would have been more than a new machine just for parts, so we scrapped it and purchased an LG HE machine. That one was a joke. It would wiggle and jiggle and occasionally kind of slosh the clothes around. It took over two hours to complete a normal load. It got worse and we finagled a warranty repair, at two years, and it did do better for a while. Then it started getting perpetual "unbalanced load" errors that would stop the machine dead in it's tracks. It would take all day to complete a couple of loads. My wife finally said enough. Even though it technically wasn't broken, she demanded a replacement machine. For the third machine we selected what I thought was a pretty straight forward, top-loading machine; the Kenmore VMW 110.22352510. My wife's been pretty happy with this unit until lately when it started stopping between cycles and wouldn't advance from one cycle to the next. Manually, you can move through all the cycles, but it requires that you baby sit the machine all the way through a load. I looked into this and have learned quite a bit about the Kenmore (Whirlpool) machine and it's issues. I figured out the code system and installed a new shift actuator based on the F7E5 code and initially this solved the problem. Now the thing is starting to do the same thing - stopping mid cycle. I've run the calibration mode and it will be a few days and loads of laundry to see if this helps at all. It's running a load right now. I may be back looking for more specific answers on this machine, but that's not the question of the day. My question is this: In reading about the Kenmore, it seems the consensus of this machine is that it is a piece of junk. The LG was junk. The Maytag worked well but was poorly engineered and prone to failures. So what machine is worth purchasing? I don't need a lot of features. The machine just need to wash a load of cloths reliably. I don't think that should be a big lift for a machine called a "washing machine". What is recommend?

Ok! I am a anti disposable guy in a disposable society. I want something worth repairing. A refrigerator, where you actually admire the engineering, A product that actually has brass fittings and copper. A compressor that screams," I do not care about how much electricity this costs" It would be a workhorse and rebuildable. A real start capacitor that looks like a can of soda. When I open the doors, I want to feel the weight, as if I was opening a 300 pound church door in a windstorm. Preferably no computer board or digital display panels. I am not impressed by names. It must exist because I bought a stove that fits this description. So what makes have impressed you.