LG combo washer/ventless dryer

https://www.costco.com/lg-all-...KPQUpDhPUyyEBNMztxuH

$1300 at Costco, $400 off the regular price

The first review says it takes about 3.5 hours to do a single load! Not sure if that's viable for many people.

I wonder how much energy it uses, IRL?

We've been trying to figure out how to move the laundry equipment from the basement to a more convenient area. Only having to fit in one machine is a definite space saver. Of course you could also do stackable, which is another option.

With Mr wtg's arthritis and mobility issues, we also considering a move to a ranch, possibly our neighbor's house. Her laundry room is in her basement but we've done some thinking and believe we could rearrange the main floor to make it more functional for our needs. Installing a unit like this in a large master suite arrangement could work.

There are only two of us, and we're home a lot. We usually do laundry once a week on Saturdays but it means spending a fair amount of the day going up and down stairs, or being relegated to spending the day in the basement.

If the washer and dryer are closer to the space you spend time in, you can just let it run while you're doing other things.

Definitely a niche market, though.

The AirBnBs we stayed in when we went to Italy all had combo units like that. They worked but the cycles were super long. 3.5 hours sounds about right - maybe longer. The first time I used one I had to pack up damp clothes because they weren't dry by the time we had to leave.

Ventless might be nice to humidify in the winter in cold country but would put quite a load on the air conditioner in the summer. The ad says "condensing" but the heat has to go somewhere.

Yup - what Steve said. Used one of these in an AirBnB in London - took hours and hours and the clothes always came out dampish. Quite a difference from the laundry units in the AirBnB we stayed in in Paris on the same trip - that dryer had seemed to have only a "surface of the sun" setting for heat and basically baked the clothes dry in like 10 minutes.

There was a single unit washer-dryer in my apartment in Moscow. An Electrolux. It took me a couple weeks to figure out the cycles. The manual was in Russian with a very loose translation into something resembling English.

But I usually pulled all my pants and shirts out and hung them up to dry -- every Russian apartment has a drying rack -- and aimed an electric fan at the rack for a few hours. This gave much better results than the dryer. I left my socks and undies in the dryer and they were dry within an hour. I think it had a sensor thingy to decide when the load was dry.

I honestly have no idea where it vented -- inside, outside, or not at all.

I have decided after all these years that the key to drying clothes in a reasonable time is a really really good spin cycle. My new washer has one, but it doesn't use it on all of the wash cycles, so I frequently take all the clothes out, and put half of them back and run it through a super-duper turbojet-powered spin, then do the same with the other half of the load. I still hang up my work pants and shirts. Everything takes about half as much time to dry as it does with the regular spin cycle.

Years ago when I did my laundry at a small-town Laundromat, they had an "extractor" which was a machine that just did a spin like a washing machine, but again, really darned fast. On this one, the coin-operated thingy was broken, so you could get all the spin you wanted for free! I saved a lot of quarters by spinning stuff for a couple minutes before putting it in the dryer.

I've always questioned the effectiveness of the spin cycle of a front-load washer.

pj:

quote:

I've always questioned the effectiveness of the spin cycle of a front-load washer.

hmmm..... Bet you are correct

Great to hear all the comments from folks who have had experience with the combo units.

We're on our second front loading washer. We find that clothes come out much dryer than they used to from our top loading machine; they have wicked fast spin cycles. But our last top loader had an agitator thingy in it; not sure there are a whole lot like that around anymore.

Do folks with a top loader sans agitator have any observations?

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:

Definitely a niche market, though.

Not really. When I lived in London in 1998, that's what I had there, and it was present in all smaller apartments throughout Europe. What I was told (and what I found) is that it's not as efficient as separate units, but it's an enormous space saving, which does matter to some people who are living in cramped quarters.

Coincidentally, my daughter was looking at rental apartments this week, and one of the several units should looked at had one.

(The other new thing to me was a dryer without ductwork ... it had a catch basin for moisture that you had to empty.)

Yea, I was more thinking here in suburban USA. Space constraints aren't common and people building large homes have square footage to spare for a laundry room on the main floor, or on the second floor. The ranch I mentioned is like 1400 square feet.

What I didn't realize, however, is how common they are in Europe, and that they have been for some time.

Now that we are in a city apartment, we have our first experience with a new stacked washer/dryer. I was surprised to see how big the washer is - pretty comparable to what we had in the suburbs. The newer top-load washer must spin faster than our old Maytag - things come out pretty dry!

Dryer on the top seems to work fine and it hasn't been too difficult to pull things from the bottom and get into the dryer...

quote:

Do folks with a top loader sans agitator have any observations?

No, but I recently bought a new-ish top loader with an agitator.

When I moved in here 32 years ago, I got a Whirlpool set. They were really great machines. They were mismatched and had slight blemishes, so I got them for a steal. Then, when my mother sold her house she insisted that we swap machines between my house (which she owned) and hers. I ended up with a much carpier set of Magic Chef machines. The dryer only had choices of HOT and nothing and the washer never rinsed well -- I typically ran everything through two complete cycles to rinse them thoroughly.

Last summer I bought a set of Maytag machines off craigslist for $500. The washer is way too computerized for my taste. And it's the new "high efficiency" style that uses very little water and leaves everything in a knot in the bottom. I would have preferred just a newer basic agitator-in-a-tub-full-of-water, but apparently nobody makes that anymore -- at least not of a decent quality.

I've learned how to get the Maytag to mostly do what I want. As I said, I run everything through the high-speed spin after the normal cycle.

The one thing that would be nice is a buzzer or something when it's done. Yeah, I really shun such whizzbangery, but if I got a text on my phone when the washer was done, I wouldn't complain.

quote:

Do folks with a top loader sans agitator have any observations?

Umm... not yet. We have a top loader sans agitator, but I don't have any opinions about... let me think...