Upgrading to a High Efficiency Washer and Dryer

We experienced a family crisis late last week, everything in our house started to break, our happy infrastructure was literally falling apart. First to quit on us was our fridge water dispenser, closely followed by the ice maker, then our clothes dryer decided to stop drying!

We easily managed without the ice maker and water dispenser but we quickly realized that the clothes dryer was a fairly critical piece of what makes our lives tick by so smoothly. Without our clothes dryer the pile of dirty clothes quickly reached new heights and a pile of already washed rugs started to stink up the laundry room with a rather nasty “sour” smell…

Our Old Washer and Dryer (In a Messy Laundry Room!)

But as the saying goes, for every cloud there is a silver lining, and our silver lining was the chance to upgrade our out-dated washer and now broken clothes dryer. We went to our local Lowes store and spent about an hour checking out the new features and ratings for the “high efficiency” front loading washer and dryers.

We quickly found a washer and clothes dryer pair which fit both our budget and our desire to go green with energy star appliances. We ended up choosing a pair of Maytag appliances and together they cost about $1600 which was a lot but we managed to take advantage of a 0% for 12 months deal so the decision was easy (well fairly easy – big purchases always give me a cold sweat!)

We read that the new high efficiency front loading clothes washers can save anywhere from 20% to 66% of the amount of water an old top loading washer would use! Also, the tumbling motion of the front loader is less harsh on the fabrics being washed so our clothes should look good longer…

Our New High Efficiency Washer and Dryer Installed

An early Sunday morning delivery woke us up and got the dogs barking! It was all totally worth it, the new washer and dryer looked great. We had to run the dryer for 30 mins without any clothes to burn off any dust left over from the factory (the installation technician gave us lots of tips like that!).

One big change was that we had to switch to the new High Efficiency (HE) laundry detergent which forms less suds and helps wash clothes more efficiently. After our first load of washing through the high efficiency washer we noticed how dry the clothes are once the wash cycle has finished. The install technician explained that the spin cycle of the washer actually removes a lot of the water from the clothes which makes drying times even shorter.

Top Loading vs New High Efficiency Designs

The above diagram shows how the front loading high efficiency washer uses much less water than the traditional top loading washer.

We are going to monitor our electricity and water usage to try and figure out exactly how much the new washer and dryer are saving us, stay tuned for more updates next month!

Next on our hit list of high efficiency or energy star appliances is the fridge freezer, we will be getting a new energy star fridge freezer which should further improve our energy savings. Have you recently replaced some old energy hog appliances? Tell us your story by leaving a comment…

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