Turns out dryers are pretty simple and mostly all decent. It’s the washers that are more complex and you should choose wisely.
I spent like 4 days looking at videos about dryers anyway. It’s like, the most exciting thing to happen this month.
At least my clothes come out dry in one cycle now.
We got a Speed Queen washer and dryer and are happy with them. I’ve also heard that Maytag Commercial is decent but don’t have experience with them myself.
I will say, the Speed Queen appliances have needed someone to come out to service them (something happened with the washer that I can’t recall, and the heating element on the dryer drooped and shorted and then fell apart), but at least the warranty is long enough and there haven’t been any issues with the repair technicians. That’s all I really want - a device that if (when) it has an issue, it’s worth repairing.
The heat pump all-in-one washer / dryers are compelling. A friend has one (I believe it’s LG but may be GE) and he loves it except that one of the pumps fails almost yearly and he has to replace it. I guess he would rather do that than admit defeat and the pump is relatively cheap. Maybe he saves enough time washing and drying his family’s clothes overnight while he sleeps that it’s worth a multi-hour annual surgery.
There’s not much real world time savings to be had with the all-in-one machines except for the potential (or perhaps inevitable) gap between remembering to shovel your laundry from the washer to the dryer. If your life works like mine where you’re doing something else and not paying attention to the laundry machines – riding motorcycles, wrenching on engines, taking obsessively detailed pictures of pocketknives – that slack time can indeed be significant.
The major thing is that the heat pump dryers, including the ones in the all-in-ones, are significantly more energy efficient than a traditional resistive element dryer. Like, up to 70%. (Mind you, “up to” includes a fairly wide range depending on which two models you’re comparing.) You can do your own math but figure that a traditional full sized electric dryer probably uses about 5 kWh per cycle. If you live in one of those trendy areas of the country where electricity is north of 40 cents per kWh, chopping whatever it is you use in half might be appealing.
Yeah I think the all in ones are good for 1-2 person households. Add a few kids or relatives and the ability to get two loads processing at once with a traditional setup is indispensable.