Is it men that do the washing these days? Soon we'll be doing the cooking too!

As it happens, my wife and I do our laundry separately... (something about me not knowing when to put in whites with coloreds that came up about 30 years ago. Yes, we were married back then too!).

When we needed to buy a new machine a couple of months back, I wanted a combo washer/dryer to match all the other automatic and timesaving gizmos in our place (light sensors in the garage, kitchen, hallway and front door; timer light switches; Roomba vac, Beam internal vac system; time and message-speaking computer through external speakers; etc)

It was a complete failure. Here's some of the numerous problems I found:

- Front loading meant squatting down to put in and take out washing. Bad for knees and back.

- Took up to 5 times as long to wash as a top loader. When it didn't, the clothes weren't washed as well.

- Clothes actually WORE out in 3 weeks! The collars on my polo shirts had fray marks. This I figured was a combination of the lack of water and friction against the drum. I cannot work out how the manufacturers claim that the tumble/falling action on clothes is going to be gentler than those sitting in a large body of water being agitated against the water more than each other.

- Half to a third the clothes volume of a top loader. This was a killer - trudging back and forth 2-3 times for the same wash we had previously. Our wardrobe is upstairs and we don't have a laundry chute.

- No access to clothes while in the wash cycle. You know - you've forgotten something at the last minute. Nope - you can't get in till after the cycle, which really means you're locked out until the end of the wash.

- Noise. Boy, was that sucker loud in every cycle! Our laundry backs on to our kitchen, and we could hear the labored groaning and whirring (not from overloading - just normal, and some of it was me ) from there right through to the upstairs bedrooms. And it isn't just this machine. I use front loaders often when I'm overseas, and they're all the same.

- Restricted washing detergent selection. Because front loaders claim to wash more thoroughly (equiv of Arnie banging your clothes on a rock in a river for 20 hours!) you have to use low foam powder or liquid. Choice on our supermarket shelves? A lousy one of each. And they gave the clothes a funny smell too.


I'll not go on about the drying cycle typical of this machine. The weird part-dry smell that stayed permanently in the clothes, the huge creasing problem, the small selection of materials that could be put together... the tale of horrors went on and on.

We finally arrived back at the shop 3 weeks later, shock-haired, wild-eyed and violently gesticulating (except my wife, who always looks composed), and after coughing up a loss of $250 - for it now was a secondhand machine, we replaced it with a top loader and separate dryer.

Magic! Finally we were back to civilisation. Our clothes looked and smelt better. And the weird thing was that we used most of the top level controls as the front loader, like high spin, extra rinse.

There was a big difference. It was much gentler!

Now, I won't go on about learning to drive it either... how two intelligent people, one a RTFM obsessed, the other goodlooking and a sharp dresser with exquisite features (not me if you were curious) could NOT figure out how to make it work properly after three weeks of twice daily washing and experimenting.

I won't mention the machine brand, but it was one of the dearest models in Europe. American machines may be quite different, but I suspect not.

If you're worried about saving $50 a year in washing powder and extra water, then this is all a front loader is good for in my opinion.

Oh, and I do all the cooking in our place too... the advantage of working from home while my wife chooses to work out in the real world. But I'd never wear an apron (Tool Time grunt).

Ken Silver
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~1993 SL500, glistening triple black, xenons: http://www.kensilver.com/SL
~1999 SLK 230 Kompressor, silver/black leather, CD, immaculate (my wife's)
~1991 Daimler, shiny grey/grey leather, best in country!
~ex 350SL, 230E, 280E, MX5 and a lot of other makes not nearly as nice.