FEATURES OF LATEST WASHER AND DRYER COMBO WASHING MACHINES

 “I’ve had one of these since mid-March 2015, purchased locally from a big-box store. The first thing to say: I love it. Absolutely _love_ it.

Second thing: It’s not for everyone. It’s _different_ from regular washing/drying, you have to learn how to use it (takes maybe a week’s worth of laundry to start figuring out how to get the best out of it), and your circumstances may be different from mine and you might not love it, depending.

The best parts:

Expect to shake the steam out of your dried clothes at the end of the cycle – takes no time at all: give a shirt a shake and hang it

For fabrics that can’t be dried, do a wash cycle without a dry, pull your un-dryable stuff out, then do a dry cycle (see below)

Try and get fabrics that are about the same heaviness for your load. You don’t have to be precise, but if you put one pair of jeans in with a load of sheets, the jeans will come out damp.

Use enough detergent, but not too much – doesn’t take a ton. Too much will make your clothes smell like the detergent (more than you’d like).

 

– Washes and dries my clothes while I sleep, tumble ’em ’til I get up to keep wrinkles out. Some think the “long” cycle times are a problem. For me, the “long” times aren’t considerably longer than a wash and a dry, and I don’t have to handle wet clothes in-between. I set a load at night, set the delay time to have the clothes ready when I get up and don’t think about it ’til morning. This isn’t the only way to do it, but if I need a particular set of clothes for the morning, and start late at night, I can get the machine to reliably handle the problem, have it go away ’til I’m ready for the clean clothes. Love this. Love it.

– No dryer lint-trap to have to empty every load. There’s a lint filter in the wastewater line you have to empty about monthly, or when the machine tells you to. You also have to wipe a little lint away from the door seal. No big deal.

– No dryer vent, no woodland creatures nesting in the dryer vent.

– Lighted drum – I can see what I’m doing in there!

– Uses less electricity than my old top-loader and traditional dryer, but provides better fabric care, MUCH less hassle, MUCH more convenience.

– Takes up the space of one unit, not two.

The cons:

– Biggest con: I worry a bit that the machine will break down sometime, and because it’s a rare-bird, there won’t be repair parts in inventory in the US depots. Most top-loading machines are using the manufacturer’s same 50-year-old design with different control electronics on top, and the parts supply-chain is well-established and well-stocked, besides coming from US manufacturers. I could go to Sears or the appliance parts store and walk out with a pump or motor for just about any US-made top-loader. Because this LG washer/dryer is a new thing, and there aren’t millions in the US market, there aren’t parts for millions of units in the supply chain, and you could run into problems if something broke down. So you might need to think about using a laundromat for a bit in that case. Didn’t stop me from buying it, though.

– Can’t get linen/cotton shirts to look good – they come out a bit wrinkled. This is the only fabric I’ve had trouble with – everything else looks great. If you’re doing tons of these, or are allergic to the clothes iron, this might not be the machine for you. But really, I’ve only got 3-4 shirts like this, and most of them had some permanent wrinkle in a stiffener before we got the machine. Wish they were easier, but really, I can get over it.

– Not obvious how to set a dry-only cycle, and the manual doesn’t help you figure this out. _IT DOES HAVE DRY-ONLY_ and it’s really easy: Turn the machine on, touch the “Dry” button. It’s different enough from setting a wash/dry cycle that you wouldn’t think to do this. But it works, it’s there, you can do dry-only. Might be counter-intuitive to get dry-only if you’ve got a wash-cycle selected. Might have to power the machine off, then on, then select Dry.

– You only have one machine. It’s plenty big (capacity-wise), but you can’t have two loads working, one in a washer and one in a dryer simultaneously. Not a big deal for me, but thought I’d state it. Myself, I’d rather not handle wet clothes between. Really, it’s a matter of your expectations, your flexibility, and your style of doing laundry chores.

– Initial new smell. It did smell a bit for the first week or two (one negative reviewer said it smelled like machine oil. That might be about right). That went away, and it’s fine now, didn’t ruin any clothes in the process.

– Wish the machine had a steam-only cycle. It doesn’t. It will do steam as part of wash cycles, but you don’t get to steam-and-tumble wrinkled dry clothes, for example. OK, throw a damp towel in with them or something.

– Wish the drum lights would stay on longer. They stay on for 4 minutes, and I’d like 8, or at least the ability to turn ’em back on without powering the whole machine off-then-on while I’m unloading clothes.

The wrap-up:

I love this thing. I’ll sometimes turn on the drum lights and watch it work for minutes at a time – it’s like watching a reality TV show, but with more intelligent content.

You’ll probably want the 14″ pedestal to raise the machine up for easier drum access. I do. This isn’t specific to this machine – most front-loaders could use one of these.

We put ours in a catch-tray – a plastic tray that’s designed to help keep any leaking malfunctions from ruining your floor. A proper catch tray has a drain line attached (ours doesn’t – lack planning ahead). We also were able to get a “flat” catch tray online, that slides under the machine before you raise the sides and close the corners. Hard to describe – but it works, and it fits the machine. Haven’t had a leaking malfunction, just being cautious.

Have I said I love it? Yeah. Really do. Great purchase and the difference in power usage will probably pay off the extra cost over just a few years. (that’s a guess, not a calculated figure. Looking forward to comparing year-over-year energy bills).

UPDATE May 2015 – Maybe the people who are saying “OMG 5 HOURS TO DRY CLOTHES!!!” are looking at the “5:50” that comes up when you initiate a dry-only cycle, then not checking to see how long the machine actually runs. Yes, I suppose it could take 5:50 to dry something, but actually, that’s the LONGEST it could take from the selected cycle. It’s an adaptive cycle that reduces time by sensing the humidity of the interior of the drum.

You might be done in an hour. The “5:50” isn’t a helpful guide to what will happen.

UPDATE 9/1/2015: Had our first problem, first warranty service a couple weeks ago. The drum lights on the machine went out. In all other respects, the machine worked normally. Took a couple days for the LG field guy to get to us. He arrived, took about 2 minutes to look at the machine, realized the problem, but didn’t have the parts to fix it. Said the parts are “in the US, but they haven’t been released yet”, whatever that means.

After a two week or so wait, the LG field guy got the parts, came out, installed in 20min. or so.

The new lights are much brighter and much whiter in color than the old ones, so I wonder if the first set was defective. I still am concerned that important parts might not be in stock when we need them; this repair provided a pain-free demonstration of that situation.

The LG field guy was prompt, polite and competent, so that’s a plus.

My wife has done more washing lately and says she can never get jeans right. My experience is different: don’t over-dry them, and remove and fold pretty quick and you’re good.

Still, love this machine. Works great for us.

============ An update a little past 12 months in:

After a little more than a year, the washer is still going great, and the love for it has not diminished here. Really great appliance.

Recently, I read that several installations suffer from a drain pipe that’s placed so high that the washer won’t drain its water. That does seem like a design flaw in the machine (particularly if other washing machines work just fine in the same space), and it seems like it’d cause problems with extremely poor drying that others are seeing. Myself, I’ve had no trouble with the draining, or drying, and the machine works just great.

My wife got me the 14″ tall pedestal for the machine (which I’d guess can only help with the draining problem others have had) for my birthday, and it’s really great to have the machine at a workable height. Don’t know how I made it work without it now. For a post-installation install of a pedestal, I recommend you get lifting straps (sold under many names; one that springs to mind is “forearm forklift”) and a strong friend to lift, and another friend to position the pedestal under the machine.

One thing the machine does poorly is handling envelopes. Boxes of them. I can’t recommend that you wash a full box of 60 new #10 business envelopes in the machine (including the box), along with whatever you’ve had the couch covered in, though we _have_ tried it, entirely by accident. Quite a mess.

I cleaned the machine’s tub out the best I could and paid special attention to all the nooks and crannies around the door gasket (lots of pulp in there), and I ran a tub-clean cycle, while I shook envelope bits and paper pulp off of the couch cover over the deck in back of the house.

Soon enough, the machine showed a “0E” error (which I supposed might mean: “0uch! Envelopes!”) and I checked the manual: the machine can’t drain water. I pulled the filter drain hose and tried to drain into a bucket, then pulled the filter, which turned into a little flood: recommend you have several buckets and a friend handy when handling this kind of problem. The filter was packed with grey paper pulp, which I cleaned out. I ran another empty cycle on tub clean (no 0E error this time), cleaned a few remnants of pulp from the filter, and found more in the drum and on the door gasket. I changed a load of laundry (grey to match the remaining pulp) and made it through fine.

A number of loads later, the machine is still going strong, and appears to have shaken off the envelope episode like a champ, and without a service call. Big props to it!

UPDATE 5/14/2016 – data on the humidity question.

I’ve been asked whether the machine makes the house more humid, and kind of fumbled for a response (generally, no, it doesn’t). Here’s a data point from an experiment: I borrowed a hygrometer (an Oasis musical instrument hygrometer, which helps musicians care for their wood instruments by measuring humidity and temperature and recording minimums and maximums – you can buy one on Amazon).

 

After about five minutes of settling time in our kitchen (a good proxy for the rest of the house), no laundry run that day, and the humidity read 53%. I moved the unit into the laundry room/pantry (about 9.5′ x 11′, door open, also a freezer in the room) and let it settle there for a few minutes while I loaded the washer. Again, baseline at 53%. I set a four-hour delay and ran the laundry (mid-size load of jeans) overnight. In the morning, the recorded max on the hygrometer was 57% humidity. By the time I came to look at it, the room had returned to 53%.

I remain convinced that people who are having disastrous humidity or wet clothes problems are suffering from the reported installation issue where the drain pipe is too tall for the machine to effectively drain water. Yes, I think that’s a design flaw in the machine, but one that can be worked around at installation time, if the installer knows about it.

Only one data point, but some data is better than none. Hope this helps!

UPDATE: Over 2 years in, still love the machine.

We were out of town for a few days, and the display said “CL” and the machine wouldn’t take any input at all. I was very worried. This symptom didn’t show up in the manual. I looked it up online.

“Child Lock”. The door was locked and it’s not supposed to take any input in this state. Easy enough for a grown-up to turn off. What I imagine happened is that there was a power-cut while we were gone, and Child Lock comes on as some kind of safety feature or something.”