I just got an Avanti W798SS from Walmart online. No one in south Florida will sell apartment sized washers except for one $700 Maytag model at Brandsmart.
I tried to order a Haier online but the retailer doesn't actually have what he advertises
and Haier knows
and allows this to go on because the dealer sends a lot of business their way. It took two months to get my money back. After that hassle I decided not to buy Haier and to only buy from someone who I knew wouldn't lie to me. The Currie eBike I have was bought from Walmart Site-to-Store the same way with no hassle or complaint.
The Avanti was $450 delivered, double what I wanted to spend and three times the price of a regular plain jane full sized washer, but it is worth what I paid. In extended power outages after hurricanes here in south Florida, smaller is better. The Avanti has a microprocessor controlled stepping motor that will run off the portable genset I have. The Roper it replaces needs three times the peak power. The Avanti will wash 4/5 as much as the Roper for half the electricity. There is a disc agitator at the bottom of the Avanti, and a taller than normal drum, so the usable space is almost the same. Someone at Avanti thought Outside the Box in design. You can hear the motor wind up and then coast as it works. The spin cycle uses 450 watts peak but in pulses. The motor spins up and coasts, spins up and coasts. The agitate cycle does the same.
Using a Kill-A-Watt meter and the default Normal setting on the Avanti, it took an hour to wash a load but only used 1/8 KWH to do it. The stainless stell drum is a $20 option over plastic (the 'SS' in the model number). I figured it would be dumb not to spend the twenty.
There is one semi major design problem with this machine. The picture and description show the drain hose exiting the right side of the machine, which is the same side as the knob for leveling the front feet. Someone changed the design and routed the hose out the left. This makes the required clearance at least three inches wider than advertised and is unsafe as well. I almost chopped off the rather flimsy drain hose the first time I pushed the machine back to set it in place. Without the foot knob to protect the hose something solid must be wedged on the left side of the machine to protect it when the machine moves around in use.
Since this would not work where I intended to install it, I removed the metal back plate and routed the drain hose out the top of the opening and used black poly sprinker hose to shield the drain hose from the edge of the opening. The metal plate is paper thin and flexes enough to allow the hose to pass and still reattach the six screws holding it to the back of the machine. Avanti routed the hose off the left side because of the shape of the pump outlet. It was not safe to kink it and run it to the right. Avanti should have run the drain hose out the top. There was room to do that but I didn't because that would have required drilling and cutting a machine still under warranty.
The computer bit is really overkill for a single guy like me. I throw it all in together and if it's clean, that's all I care. But the options are what justify the price. You can have it spray rinse or fill rinse, rinse once or twice, soak only, wash only, spin only and have it wash long or short, weak or hard. It even has a child-proof option that will drain the machine completely and give a verbal alarm if the lid is opened for more than 10 seconds during a cycle. It comes with a removable lint filter, too.
I put the drain down a common bathroom sink and there was no hint of a backup. You get a small baggy with two faucet adapters. I bought a Y hose adapter so I could mount the supply hose permanently and still use the sink. You SHOULD NOT attach and detach the supply hose each time you use the washer. The supply hoses are cheap and have soft plastic couplings. They will not last long unless they are only mounted and left that way.
The links below go to my Photobucket account and are full sized pics of the thumbnails below.
http://s269.photobucket.com/albums/jj62/dnix71/?action=view¤t=IMG_0099.jpghttp://s269.photobucket.com/albums/jj62/dnix71/?action=view¤t=IMG_0097.jpg
