Four years ago when either or washer or our dryer died (I forgot which), Susan did a bunch of research and found the then relatively new GE Profile combination washer/dryer a combination. The big selling point is the ability to put your clothes into a single appliance, press a button, and come back a few hours later to clothes that have not only been washed but also dried. It had a bunch of ohter neat features, too.

Too bad it’s a gigantic piece of crap.

After about a year of use we noticed that our clothes ewren’t coming out dry. A lot of reviews say that the clothes get steamed and some out slightly wet to avoid wrinkles, but… these were wet. Over the years we’ve learned our lesson and always buy the extended warranty when purchasing appliances from Home Depot. When the repairman came out he first told us that it was imperitive to empty and clean the lint filter which we usually do, but then he asked us if we had been using the GE brush to clean out the unit’s internals.

Uh… no?

Inside the device are heat coils that air as to pass over in order to dry your clothes. Two of these heat coils are located directly next to the lint trap, so basically everything that blows around off your clothes ends up landing on those heat coils, which makes them less effective… which means, wet clothes. The repairman seemed incredulous that we didn’t own GE’s official brush designed to clean the coils and when we asked to see his, he didn’t have one either. On his next visit, he used the magic brush to clean the coils and pulled out a bunch of cat hair.

“Oh,” he said. “These units aren’t good for people who own pets.”

That’s the kind of thing they should tell you before spending $2,300, in my opinion.

Over time, the problem got worse. Last year after another service call, the repairman told us must have lint or pet hair on the coils. When we told him we were cleaning the lint trap every time and using the magic GE brush, he said, “oh, these are the coils you can’t reach.”

What the what.

So, yeah. There are more coils that you can’t get to without disassembling the entire unit, which takes two people to do because the thing is so heavy. The repairman returned with a partner to disassemble the entire unit to clean it because that sounds like a great design. While he was doing this, he explained to us in great detail all the flaws in the unit’s design — not the least of which is that the lint trap has gaps around the edges which allows some of the lint and some of the pet hair to blow right past it and land on the heat coils. There is no way to prevent this from happening and no way to clean them.

This is the point in the story where most people say “if it were me, I’d…” and then I have to remind them I’m married to Susan, who suffers no fools. This is usually the point where I walk away and come back to hear how it went, and when I came back Susan told me the manager’s manager had issued us a full refund on the init and told us to keep it.

So we did, and it lasted another six months. It worked okay after the last repair visit and over time our clothes began drying less and less. We got used to removing damp clothes from the dryer and hanging them up to let them finish drying. Then on Christmas Eve, just hours before our family was scheduled to arrive for our annual Christmas party, the GE Profile let out one final gasp and dumped gallons of stinky water out onto the floor.

Good riddance.

The day after Christmas, Susan ordered a new washer and dryer set. They’re far from fancy, which we hope translates to “less things to break.” The washer arrived sometime last week and the delivery man said there was something wrong with the dryer so he took it back and scheduled another dryer delivery, which took another week. I have close to a hundred t-shirts from Amazon and enough socks and underwear to last two months. One extra week didn’t affect me.

Yesterday the dryer arrived and was hooked up in minutes. Susan’s now catching up on weeks worth of laundry and says the new set are working great.

The best part of the story is that they hauled the other one off. Because it was so heavy it took them a while to get it on a dolly and through the house which game me plenty of time to tell them all about how much it sucked.