A lot of houses have closets and hallways architected to fit a standard top loading washing machine, which seems to have been roughly 27x27x44″ high. Here’s a 3.9 cu. ft. Whirlpool:
By cheating just a little, e.g., stretching the depth to 27 and 7/8″, Whirlpool can deliver a machine with a 5.2 cu. ft. drum.
It would seem obvious to build a front load washing machine with the same 27×27″ footprint, but nobody seems to do that. One of Whirlpool’s smaller front loaders is advertised as “closet-depth” and, in fact, is about 31.5″ deep. Their bigger front loaders are over 33 inches deep with the door closed. If you scale down to a “compact” front loader, as seen in Europe, the footprint is 24×24″ and capacity drops to just 1.9 cu. ft.
What’s the engineering challenge to making a front loading washer that exactly fits the footprint of a legacy washing machine and, thus, fits into an older American house as it was originally designed?
(Our house is an example of one in which 27-inch depth is the limit. The laundry room connects the family room/kitchen to the garage. A machine deeper than 27 inches will stick out beyond the door frame (top of the figure below) and obstruct access into the garage:
In fact, the only way to have 27-inch deep machines not poke into the hallway is to dig into the 4-inch drywall behind the machines, e.g., to make water and gas connections. Everything must be perfectly positioned for the machines to sit flush on the baseboard.
In other fun appliance news, an architect who redesigned our Harvard Square apartment’s kitchen notched out cabinets to precisely fit a particular LG fridge that we bought back in 2013. The fridge has French doors, which introduces another point of failure beyond a conventional side-by-side fridge or bottom-freezer fridge. The “mullion door” or “flapper door” in the middle of the French doors had a failed spring. I thought about buying a replacement, but was concerned that the notches wouldn’t work for the new fridge and also I couldn’t find any current fridges that had stainless steel sides as the old one did. Thus, it was time to think about repairing the minor problem with the 11-year-old fridge.
I was renting it out on AirBnB, couldn’t get up to Cambridge to fix it myself, and didn’t want to hassle my friend from MIT who is a mechanical genius but has his own 130-year-old 3-story wooden house to maintain. I called LG service and they offered a fixed $399 flat-rate repair fee. I gave them the model and serial number in advance and told them exactly what the problem was and what part was needed. The technician came out to the apartment, diagnosed the problem as the flapper door, and then said that no replacement part was available (the LG Parts web site showed a compatible replacement and eBay had the exact part number available from an appliance store that apparently had a lot of old stock). While monkeying with the fridge, he managed to short out the control board so the fridge went from “tough to close” to “completely dead.” The flapper door actually has an electrical connection to the control system in order to run a heater that prevents condensation from forming on the door. I then asked a series of people who answered LG’s 800 number with thick Indian accents whether I could perhaps get a refund of the $399 repair fee since they themselves acknowledged that they hadn’t repaired anything. They never simply refused to refund the money, but always said that it would be considered by some other group and that someone would get back to me. Of course, nobody ever did get back to me and LG never did issue any refund.
Isn’t that what the chargeback is for? Or did LG demand cash or bitcoin for this misadventure?
Mitch: I paid with a Bank of America debit card. So maybe they would refund some or all of the money via a dispute resolution process. But it is kind of a complex story. I give LG credit for discouraging consumers from disputing charges by telling them, “Of course it doesn’t make sense to charge you $399 if we didn’t fix anything, but the refund has to be reviewed by another department.”
As I understand the story, LG not only failed to repair the fridge but actually broke it. Doesn’t the Commonwealth have a small claims court or similar where the indigent Koreans can be brought to book?
If the lion kingdom didn’t laugh at the problems of multi millionaires, they’d cry.
lion: The problem is even worse for homeowners who aren’t wealthy! (A lot of working class folks in, e.g., the Midwest, own houses.) They certainly can’t afford to pay a contractor to move walls and you’d think Whirlpool would give them the option of moving into the glorious front-loader age. (Supposedly the front loaders reduce wear and tear on clothing, which is also important for people with limited funds.)
I stopped buying fancy appliances some 10 years ago. Nothing last any more, more than 5-10 years! Even new home constructions are designed to fail in no time!
As for service, same story. It used to be easy to repair an appliance (or your car). Just get some tools and off you go. Or call a local repair guy to fix it for you. His time (there was no “she”) was the most expansive part of the cost (the material didn’t cost much) and best of all, they never screwed up!
Case in point. Beside my day job, I have a small rental that I manage. The old coin-op washer and dryer, that are over 25 years ago, are still going strong. Last year, for a new property, that didn’t come with a washer and dry, I bought a new set. Six months later, the washer gave in. Still under warranty, turns out, the motherboard is the issue. A similar episode happened about 2 years ago, but for the pump!
If that wasn’t enough, I buy, in bulk, dishwashers, refrigerators, and stoves when they are on sales. Almost always, something breaks on those appliances within a year. When I reach out to the manufacture, even when the appliance is still under warranty, I’m out of luck because the appliance was sitting ideal unused for 6+ months and thus the warranty period has expired!
Sorry, this didn’t answer your question “front load washing machines” but I never liked those washers to start with. I like to be able to “open” my washer when it is in use.
George A: I’m not sure that a front loader is “fancy”. It’s the only kind of washer that is available in Europe, for example, and even European peasants have washing machines these days (though not dryers). Top loaders were fine in the old days when the machine could fill itself up with water without violating federal law. But a top loader that complies with Biden administration rules (see https://environmentamerica.org/center/media-center/biden-administration-sets-new-efficiency-standards-for-washing-machines-clothes-dryers/ ) is going to require a combination of exotic engineering and abuse of clothing in order to clean half as well as a front loader. I think a 2024 front loader is less likely to fail compared to a 2024 top loader. If nothing else, the top loaders now have complex and fragile suspensions that are failure-prone.
@philg clearly the answer is to find someone foolish enough to be selling their 1970’s top-loader on craigslist. There are a couple of plastic parts (a belt and some cogs) that you’ll immediately replace before you even install it, and you won’t have to think about washing machines for a decade or two. (If you don’t believe me, walk into a laundromat sometime)
What am I missing about your floor plan? I see 5’8″, which is 68 inches. Why would 33 inches be impossible for the depth of the washer vs. 27 inches? You still have around 40 inches between the front of the washer and the opposite wall, given the 3 or 4 inches behind the washer for supply and drain hoses and electrical connections.
Also, if you’d like more space around the water heater area, replace the tank type with a tankless.
The water heater is in the garage and isn’t a factor for the question of whether the hallway between the garage and the pantry is obstructed.
I have measured with a tape and it is only barely more than 27 inches from the back wall to the edge of the door frame into the garage.
The 5’8″ dimension is concrete block to concrete block. We lose 4 inches on the left side (I guess that wall was built thicker to accommodate plumbing) and maybe 1.5 inches on the right side (furring strips over the concrete block and then sheetrock).) There isn’t a dimension on the door frame that’s between the washing machine and the water heater (in the garage), but certainly a 27″ dryer (the left/right position is reversed on the blueprint; the washer is left of the dryer) will be almost exactly flush to the edge of the door opening.
I just measured again. It is 66.5″ wall-to-wall (so actually the concrete block measurement would be closer to 6′). Left-wall-to-left door frame edge is 27.5″. Right-wall-to-right-door-frame edge is about 6″. It certainly is possible to walk past the machines even if they’re sticking into an extension of the doorway, but it doesn’t look right.
The architect’s draftsmanship leaves a little to be desired, all the smaller lettering has the letters jammed together, and the area labeled D has a lid for a top-load washer, and the area labeled W has a little door for a lint filter. But you note that the washer is by the door, not where the top-load lid is. I see your dilemma. Swapping the two means extending the hoses, which isn’t ideal.
The reason a front-load washer has to be deeper for the same tub capacity is that the mechanical parts that operate the tub are behind the tub instead of below the tub. If it wasn’t deeper, it would have to be wider for a larger diameter tub, and the space allocated by an architect is likely to be more restricted for width than it is for depth, so probably no washer manufacturer makes a larger diameter tub. Also there would be practical problems with centrifugal force.
I probably still have which is which between washer and dryer backwards.
Maybe stacking the dryer above the washer vertically would help make the use of space more pleasant.
The dryer in reality is towards the top of the drawing (on the other side of the wall from the “GHW” (gas hot water heater)).
What you say about mechanicals being behind the drum makes sense, but I still don’t know not a single company makes a 27×27″ footprint front loader. Maybe it would have 3.5 cu. ft. capacity instead of 4.3 (the Whirlpool “closet depth” one). That’s a lot better than the 1.9 cu. ft. capacity of the 24″-wide ones.
Stacking wouldn’t help us because we’d still have the depth issue unless we stacked the Derek Zoolander-style 24″ units (which would require ripping out cabinets that are above).
Look at a Speed Queen if your willing to keep the top loader format. They’re supposed to last a long time and you can bypass the default eco mode to fill the tub all the way.