WARNING: Review updated Sept. 2003, read Flood Warning! (bottom)
The Order:
Originally, we were thinking about a Thor or an Equator, but they were too pricey—and their reviews weren’t good enough to justify it. After months of deliberations and Laundromat weekends, we ordered the Haier XQG50-11 from Compact Appliance (see our review here
http://www.epinions.com/content_92171701892) late one Saturday night.
The Arrival:
It arrived one week later, on a Monday afternoon. Compact Appliance ships via Con-Way freight, and technically it’s curb delivery. Our delivery guy appreciated our help getting the washer out of the truck, and didn’t mind helping us bring it inside the front door. This washer weighs about 170 pounds: you’ll need two people to get it past stairs.
Unpacking:
Two people can get this washer unpacked and moved around okay, but for one lone guy, it’s a chore. Have help. The owner’s manual tells you to remove shipping supports (bolts that keep the wash drum from bouncing around during shipping) before you run it, but it only shows two of the bolts. The third bolt looks like the first two—you can’t miss them, but as an engineering student, I had second thoughts here. The manual also mentions an included wrench, used to adjust the leveling feet and removing said bolts. No such wrench was found. A flat-head screwdriver is all you really need to get going, however. (My overall opinion improved, of course!)
Setting Up:
We rent a tiny house, and it’s carpeted throughout. The washer has wheels, and one person can swing the washer around like a shopping cart on hardwood floors. The wheels just grab hold of carpet, however. Moving it across carpet was a two-person job. After setting it up (it’s just two hoses, one plug, and hang the drain hose in the sink, right?), I broke down and read the manual. It says: “THOU SHALT NOT PLACE THIS WASHER ON CARPET.” Argh! We wanted to see this thing in action, carpet or no carpet. The shipping pallet! We set it on the shipping pallet, and gave it a run…
Firing It Up:
Again, the manual speaks: “You should probably use less soap than you’re used to using.” For liquid detergent, this is a gross understatement! We ran two old towels through the first run, and found that using a QUARTER of the LIQUID SOAP we normally used was TOO MUCH! The wash cycle ran with three inches of foam on top of our towels, and the rinse was likely inadequate. The second run through with a full load of towels and such, we got a little too minimalistic with the soap and only added one good squirt of detergent… the socks were still stinky when they came out. Third try, we gave it about a quarter cup of detergent, plus some baking soda in the pre-wash. After doing this, we decided that the manual had mixed up the bins. They said you couldn’t put liquid detergent in the pre-wash cycle compartment, only powder. But if you put liquid detergent in the main wash compartment then it all drains out during the pre-wash and you have to add more later for the regular wash cycle to get any suds. If you don’t use the pre-wash, then disregard this. But if you DO use the pre-wash, then put powder in the main wash and powder OR liquid in the pre-wash. Powder won’t drain down during pre-wash like liquid will.
The Detergent/Bleach/Fabric Softener Tray:
There’s a handy little drawer on the top front of the washer that you pull open and put your cleaning agents in. There’s one for pre-wash, one for regular wash, one for bleach, and one for fabric softener. With this washer, you need only about ¼ cup of your favorite liquid detergent. We've since switched to powdered detergent since powdered soap doesn’t foam up as much—and rinses out of the clothes better. If you're using powder, use the low mark on a scoop of any detergent (we use Arm&Hammer Fabricare FREE, and we've been on the same box for over 2 months, even doing a load a day).Because liquid detergent makers want you to use a lot of their expensive soap, they give you a full cup measure in the cap, which is far too much for the Haier. But with the Haier, you should completely disregard this cap. If you try to use the cap to pour into the tray, it will spill all over the place because compared to a huge top-load washer's opening, the drawer on the side-load is very tiny, and the cap isn't designed for accuracy. To measure the liquid soap, we found that putting the soap in a shampoo bottle works great.
Shaking:
(If you have Anything But Carpet, skip to the next paragraph.) On our pallet-on-carpet try, we found the machine rocked a lot. It never moved around on the pallet, but it rocked bad enough to keep us in the room during the first wash. Again, the manual says, “Thou shalt not place this washer on carpet.” Later, we pulled up the carpet underneath the machine, removed a two-foot square section of padding, replaced the carpet, and set a concrete paving stone (2’x2’, $5 at Home Depot) on top of the carpet. Now, the washer is rock-solid! NO SHAKES! Hardwood floors, linoleum, tile, etc., shouldn’t need any special reinforcement. Because we rent our house, we just didn’t want to permanently remove the carpet. Again, the machine itself is superbly defended against the shakes, when placed on hard floors. It is important to note that if you stop the washer for any reason before either of the big spin cycles come on, and let the clothes sit for a while, they will all pool to the bottom (instead of being evenly distributed around the barrel), causing the load to become unbalanced and the machine to shake & thump violently. If you leave it, the machine can take it, but it does sound rather distressing. So if you've done this, and you're concerned, it's probably best to turn the dial back through one of the rinse cycles so the clothes can be redistributed evenly & there won't be any clunks.
Noise:
When the machine is on the washing cycle it’s pretty darn quiet (a little less than a conventional washer). When it goes on the super fast spin cycle, it hardly vibrates at all and is really very quiet. The 2nd fastest dry cycle is the most auduble of all of them, and vibrates more than at any time during the machine's use, but this spin cycle only lasts 5-10 minutes and it really isn't too bad. To give you an idea, the washer is in a room next to our bedroom, and we run our loads at night while we're sleeping. The Haier doesn't keep us up, or wake us in the middle of the night with shakes and bangs. The drying cycle is hardly audible.
Drying:
There are two types of drying on the machine, low temperature and high temperature. The low temperature lets you set the dry time as high as 80 minutes, and the high temperature lets you dry as long as 120 minutes. Sometimes towels and jeans come out a little damp (especially if you’ve overloaded the machine), but if that happens, just take out whatever’s dry, and then turn the dry time on for another 15/30 minutes or so, press the start button, and that should do it. The handbook says nothing about dryer sheets, but we just finished a load of towels and there wasn’t any static electricity when we pulled them out, so you probably don’t need them. There isn’t any loud annoying buzz when the dryer is done (I love this omission!), so if you like to get your clothes out immediately after drying is done to avoid wrinkles, you’ll have to keep an eye on it. The low temperature, contrary to Don's first belief, DOES have a heating element (Don thought it was purely condensation). So it does use electricity, but much less of it. You can dry jeans and towels with it, but it will, of course, take longer. But for a load of tee shirts, low is all you really need.
Wrinkles:
If you overload the washer with cotton items (jeans/t-shirts) even if you remove them from the dryer immediately upon completion of the cycle (when they’re so hot they’ll burn your hands) they will be quite wrinkly if you don’t use fabric softener. Fabric softener reduces the wrinkles, but doesn’t eliminate them. Smaller loads come out less wrinkled, but an iron may be in your future. We're still pretty lazy about this ironing business (and our house is awfully small), so we just give jeans and shirts a good hard shake, yank on the legs of the jeans a bit, and then fold them. Once they've sat for a day folded, the wrinkles are almost totally gone.
Cleanliness:
Although the machine uses much less detergent, clothes come out very clean. They don’t reek of detergent perfumes as they would in a regular washer, so if you like perfumy-smelling clothes, you may want to use a little more detergent or add some fabric softener (which has the added benefit of lessening wrinkles).
Lint Trap:
The "lint trap" is located at the very bottom of the machine. It isn’t your traditional lint trap (tightly-woven filter) but rather a plastic tray with holes in it about the size of your pinky finger. After doing a load of towels, we opened the lint trap, and the drawer was damp (it should be since the water filters down that way), but there wasn’t anything in it. Because this machine uses water to dry, the fuzz that you’d expect from a standard dryer (fun!) goes down the drain with this one. The lint trap exists only to catch change, paper, etc. No more sneezing over the lint trap! (Note: Woven blankets will produce fuzzy lint. Nothing else we’ve washed left any lint in the trap. After washing fuzzy blankets, clean the trap! Otherwise, the lint will be recycled into the next load.).
UPDATE!: When you get the machine, there are several stickers on the front of it, including one on the lint trap that warns you to NEVER open the lint trap while there is water in the machine. This also means that when you check the lint trap, be sure it's sitting snugly in its position before running another load! We checked it after a load and didn't screw it in right (it was a little cock-eyed) and when we started the machine up for the next load, water started dribbling out of the lint trap! Don't make the same mistake we did (we wound up having to buy a wet/dry vac to suck up all the water... we weren't in the room while it was leaking)! Be sure you've got the lint trap securely in its hole before running the machine! It would probably be a good idea to watch the machine for a little bit as it fills up with water to make sure there aren't any leaks coming from a non-tightened lint trap! But this mistake was ours, not the machine's... so we still love it.
UPDATE2: There's a review on epinions for the larger 14lb capacity Haier washer, and the owner said the repairman who came out to look at his washer/dryer told him NOT to open the lint trap because it will wear out and not produce a tight enough seal to keep in all the water. Don estimates that with constant checking (with every load), the lint trap should last many thousands of cycles (or around 10 years). After checking ours regularly, we found it was unnecessary to check the lint trap unless you washed an Indian blanket or other REALLY fuzzy things, (not even an angora sweater should produce any lint). So you should still check the lint trap after really heavy shedders. But since it is only a plastic screw cap, it may wear over time, and you should check the trap only when you really need to. The Haier uses cold water to condense the moisture from wet clothes and then sucks all that water down the drain, so most lint (all that blue stuff on the lint trap in conventional dryers after you’ve done a load of jeans and towels) will just wash down the drain, never to be seen again. The trap is not there to keep lint off your clothes, but rather to keep large objects and really thick shedders from clogging your plumbing.
Towels:
We overloaded the first load we did, but they came out clean and mostly dry after 120 minutes of drying time. A few of the larger towels were still a bit damp, so we threw them back in and set they dryer for another 15 minutes and voila! Warm and dry. We were washing some older towels, but it seemed to me that they weren’t as soft as they usually are. Fabric softener DOES make towels soft.
Jeans:
Four pairs of jeans are about all this machine can handle in one load. With a full load, expect a 150-minute dry time. The dry timer allows a 120-minute max dry time; you’ll have to set it again for the extra half-hour. Unlike a standard dryer, this machine produces somewhat wrinkly jeans. Fabric softener fixes this a bit. Ironing fanatics shouldn’t care… The jeans come out clean, of course. :)
Cotton (T-shirts, etc.):
Washing works as good as any washer. Drying takes 120-135 minutes with a full load, depending on your personal definition of dry. 135 minutes produces hot, bone-dry tees (using the high setting).
Blankets and Sheets:
A full-sized velux blanket fits this washer just about perfectly, and dries in around three hours. Queen blankets and thick, full-size comforters will require the 14-lb capacity washer.
Soap & Fabric Softener:
Using about half the liquid soap you normally use (top-load washer) works fine, and may be too much. Liquid soaps are hard to measure correctly for the load, however. A little too much creates vast amounts of foam, rendering the rinse cycle useless and making clothes smell heavily of your laundry soap. Too little soap leaves stinky socks stinky. Liquid soaps also wind up getting into the wash before you want them, if you use soap for prewash and wash.
Powdered soap stays put until you need it: the prewash soap goes in the prewash, and the main wash soap goes in the main wash. After giving up on liquid, we tried Arm & Hammer FabriCare soap, the perfume- and dye-free type. Using the medium measure on the scoop and washing a full towel/sock load, the wash came out clean without foaming too terribly—thus allowing the rinse cycle to rinse the soap out of the towels.
You can use dryer sheets with this machine, but it does little good. Dryer sheets must be added after the wash, during the dry cycle—defeating the “set it and forget it” ease of use this machine has. Static cling is never an issue (sheets or no sheets), but if you like the “purdy stink” of dryer sheets, you’ll have to learn to love liquid fabric softener. Liquid softener goes in a bin on the top of the washer, before the wash cycle, so you can still walk away from the machine and find clean, dry, soft clothes when you care to look again.
The Washer/Dryer Combo Lifestyle:
You may think laundry is something for Sunday afternoons. This machine requires a different mentality. The average full load takes around three hours to complete, and a week’s worth of muddy jeans, funky tees, and putrid, festering, week-old socks won’t get clean in an afternoon. However, if you can train yourself to wash when you have a load ready, this washer works out great. No more hiding those unsightly funk-piles! If you’re pulling 12+ hour workdays, the weekend laundry routine will probably push you into the 14-lb capacity model. If you absolutely must do laundry on the weekends only, you may want to stick with the old-style washer and dryer. For everyone else, this washer should greatly improve your household hygiene. Just get one of those tiny laundry baskets and once it’s full, toss it in the washer and do a load.
Buttons and Knobs:
The front of the machine has three buttons and two knobs. The button choices are On/Off, No Spin (for delicates), and Water Saver (uses less water on the rinse only). You must push the On/Off button to Off before turning the dials, but this is similar to a top-load washer (If you’re brave, you can try this on your top-load washer. My last top-loader got confused if it was on and I spun the dial around). Choosing No Spin requires a manual start of the dry cycle; otherwise, the dry cycle starts immediately after the wash for cotton fabrics. One knob controls the dry time (Hot, 0-120 min; and Cold, 0-80 min). The other knob gives the wash cycles, with sub-categories for each:
Cotton: Prewash, Intense, Normal, Delicate
Synthetic: Intense, Normal, Delicate
Wool: Delicate
Choosing Prewash or Intense gives you hot wash water, Normal gives warm, and Delicate gives cold water. For the Cotton cycles of Intense, Normal, and Delicate cycles, expect wash cycles of 120, 80, and 60 minutes, respectively. Synthetic cycles are shorter, and Wool takes 30 minutes. The average full load of warm/cotton takes around 2 ½ hours (3 hours for the bone, burn-your-fingers dry people, and we really aren't kidding about that. When you first take them out after they're completely dry, they WILL burn your fingers, just like a conventional dryer on high heat).
Details, Details:
The soap tray is a plastic, molded tray. It is a no-frills, plain design. The dials are equally no-frills, but functional. If you prefer fancy plastic soap trays and luxury knobs, expect to pay $1000 or more for a competing brand.
In the back of the washer, behind a large, convenient door, you can see/touch/admire the drive belt. I’ve replaced a conventional top-load washer drive belt, and a conventional dryer drive belt. Both belt replacements, on conventional washers and dryers, took about two hours—you literally have to disassemble the entire machine. With the Haier washer, the missus could change the belt in 5 minutes! It’s obvious where the money goes in this washer: It goes into the functionality. Bravo, Haier!
Conclusion:
All in all, after 2 months (we bought it in March, this update is in May), we love the Haier. We've really got the rhythm down of starting a load before we go to bed and waking up to clean laundry. I suppose if you worked, you could also start a second load right before you left for work, and come home to clean clothes too! Come to think of it, if you wanted to get really minimalistic, you could just own one pair of jeans, and wash them every day. But then again, most people wouldn't understand why you were wearing the same pair of pants every day, unless they were Haier owners too! But it would be easier if you've got a small clothes storage space! Good luck everyone with their Haiers. We hope this review helps!
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Flood Warning! Update, Sept. 2003
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After six months, our washer has taken to flooding. One day, while we were washing clothes in one room and doing homework in another, we heard a "water" noise... Behold, our washer floods. The washer had been filling for a rinse cycle, and filled beyond the call of duty, flooding our back room. We removed the carpet and let everything dry out.
We then cleaned the lint trap, just in case. The lint trap had fuzz in it, but the holes were far from blocked. We crossed our fingers, and gave it a run. And it worked! Once...
We tried it a few more times. Having been flooded once, we were leery of it, and sat next to it for our test loads. Everything worked out fine, and we gradually let ourselves get farther and farther from it. Then, when we least expected it, it flooded again (on about the fifth load after the first flood).
This time, we used the spin cycle to dump the water, but found that the motor wouldn't run on it's slow spin speed. We opened the back cover (where you remove the shipping bolts)... On the bottom, just inside the cover, and covered with water, was a very open, exposed, and very wet circuit board, in plain sight! Bad engineering practice!
We'll let you know how the warranty work goes as soon as we know ourselves. But given the poor placement of open circuit boards, and the washer's ability to fill and flood, we cannot recommend this machine.
We apologize to those of you who purchased this machine on the basis of our recommendations. Hopefully you will not have the same problems we had.
Kathleen & Don
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::UPDATE:: September 17, 2005
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It's been a while since all this happened, and I'm not even sure if this washer is still sold, but I'll try and provide an accurate conclusion to our experience for the sake of continuity.
When last we left you, we were waiting to hear back on the warranty for our washer/dryer. Initially, Haier wanted to send out a repairman to look at the washer. But they said we'd have to arrange that. We held on the phone while the operator found a "certified" repairman. This was AAA Appliance, or some such company. We called them up and left a message, hoping they would get back in touch soon. They didn't. So Haier found us another "certified" repair shop which, coincidentally, was ABC Appliance Repair. It was at this point that we realized the Haier operators weren't finding repair people qualified to fix our very unusual washer, but rather were just calling up the first name in the phone book.
The guy from ABC Repair was very nice and came out to look at our washer pretty quickly. But he admitted he knew very little about this style of washer, but since it was warranty work and Haier would be paying for it, he'd order some replacement parts and toss them in there to see if that would fix the problem. He thought the cause of the overflow might be because of a faulty water level sensor. He also thought this sensor might have gone bad because we were using regular laundry soap which creates more bubbles and residue than High Efficiency (HE) laundry soap does, and the extra residue might have blocked the sensor.
We looked through the manual, but nowhere did Haier mention that we should "only" use HE detergent, in fact, they didn't even mention HE detergent anywhere in the manual. So we breathed a sigh of relief that, at least, it wasn't our fault and Haier wouldn't be able to wriggle out of the warranty. Our repairman said he'd get back in touch with us when the new parts arrived. A month later we had heard nothing. We eventually called Haier again (right before our warranty was set to expire, eep!) and complained of the shoddy service we'd received and told them we just wanted a working washer or our money back. So they arranged to have the old washer picked up, and a new one dropped off at no charge to us. This part happened very quickly, and we were very happy with this part of the warranty. To be fair, the problems we'd had earlier were with the local repair men not getting back in touch. Haier was always courteous and responsive in regards to our warranty questions.
When we got the new washer, we only used HE detergent in it, and had no problems whatsoever. But we were still very leery of the washer. It had failed us so many times in the past, to the point where we replaced ALL the new carpet in our house with vinyl tile because of the flooding. So when we moved to Austin in the summer of 2004, we sold the (brand new replacement) washer to another college student. We warned her about the flooding if she didn't use HE detergent, and even went over and helped her get it into the house and hooked up in her bathroom (lucky girl had a drain in the floor, so she should have no problems!).
So we walked away from our experience a bit gun-shy of Haier. Even if their customer service finally replaced our washer, why was there circuitry exposed to water? Why didn't they explicitly state to use HE detergent, and why did they have such a finicky sensor anyway. And if they were going to have a finicky sensor, there should at least be a backup sensor, a last resort that could sense water about to overflow through the detergent drawer and stop the water flow. That doesn't seem that difficult.
So we've resolved to never buy any products from Haier again, and save ourselves some pain and aggravation.
