- UK made
- hot and cold water fill (useful when you have surplus hot water sometimes because of cooking/heating on a wood stove!)
- high ratings for repairablity and customer satisfaction
- 7 year guarantee - that's longer than most washing machine last these days!
- a unique stop button so you can put in that sock that fell out of the basket....
Down side is that they cost a bit more than the average machine - c.£850 but I'm thinking they are probably worth it for us.
Here's a video from an repair specialist saying what he likes and dislikes about the machines:
I don't know about machines in the UK, but here in the US, Speed Queen makes a commercial model that has no chips all the switches are mechanical contact and it has a mechanical timer. They are somewhat costly here but should last 20 plus years. Most of these models are sold to government agencies and or the military. But these models can be ordered for the public, just not to be found in the big box stores.
Yes Deane, all mechanical makes things much simpler! There seems to be a 'speed queen' brand available , but they only do commercial machines as far as I can tell - coin operated for laundromats (gosh the price of a wash there seems to have gone up a bit!) prices for a top loader about £2300...seems to be US based though, so it may be the same outfit.
This is getting a little off topic, a friend stopped by a laundromat a few weeks ago to check prices. He said it was 7 USD for a wash and 4 USD for the dryer (only 20 minutes) and the machines used a card reader, no coin or cash.
We had planned to get a speedqueen when our 30 year plus maytag died.
We just couldn't manage the cost so stuck with a Maytag that was half the price.
Our old one was all mechanical, just a few settings, water level...could stop a load and soak, and skip a cycle and go straitght to spin and no lid lock.
This new maytag is not the same...too many settings, all buttons....funny sounding auto fill and there's that stupid lid lock...turns out Maytag was bought by Whirlpool so all we got was the name really. I doubt it will make it the more than 30 years of the old one that survived laundry for teenage boys, my mother, Steve and I plus my weaving projects...spent a total of $100 on repair that whole time...easy to change fuses and helpful people on the phone to troubleshoot.
I'm really wishing we had figured out how to get the SpeedQueen.
Post by:autobot
Every time you till, you lose 30% of your organic matter. But this tiny ad is durable:
permaculture thorns, A Book About Trying to Build Permaculture Community - draft eBook
![[Logo]](/templates/default/mobile/images/mobile-permies-2015.png)
