Xiaoniu 小妞

You can tell who is the family man when you hear a man getting excited about new appliances. No more fridge pissing on the floor. No more frozen veggies. No more bending over to pick food out of the fridge. Not to mention no more wet clothes coming out of the dryer and no more wasting water and electricity. I feel like a king with a new throne.

First up with a new fridge. Nothing fancy, but a nice, solid replacement. It has a working ice maker and keeps food properly cooled. Sold under the Kenmore name, but manufactured by LG. If you looked quickly at the new fridge you probably wouldn’t even notice that it was different, but it is. A 33 inch, French door style fridge. Cool.

A matching set of LG washer and dryer. We opted for the mid-range units. Not too fancy, we don’t need a steam washer, but not low-end either. I was planning to go for pedestals, but I’m having second thoughts. The front loaders are not too bad and with them on 16” pedestals they’ll fill up the room and I would have to move cabinetry.

The units are nice. They’re spiffy and modern, and they play a little song when a cycle is complete. I was hoping for more volume and faster washes, but I’ve learned that high efficiency does not mean fast. The washer does an excellent job washing a load of clothes with what looks like 2 quarts of water and about 2 tablespoons of soap; however, it takes about 53 minutes to complete a load. 10 minutes of just spin cycle. The clothes are quite dry when done, which is another big energy save; shorter drying cycles. In fact the dryer takes about 36-40 minutes to completely dry and cool a load of laundry.

The total time is about the same as our old appliances, but most of the time was spent in the dryer. 70-80 minutes of drying cut in half with far less water. My fingers are crossed in hope that our electric bill goes down. We already cut our gas bill by 25%, now it is time for the electric to drop.

Next up is a new dishwasher. We ordered one online and it just came in today. With snow in the forecast it may be a few days before I can bring it home and install it. Our old dishwasher is old like our other appliances (14-16 years old) and is due for retirement. In fact it’s even starting to act funny. The new unit is LG (keeping with the theme) with a black finish. Again, it is not a high end unit, but not low end either. Just the right amount of features for us.

We’ve been planning to buy these appliances for a while now, but were waiting for the government rebate. It only started about 1.5 weeks ago. So, we’ll get a few bucks back from the government just for replacing and recycling the old appliances with new, energy efficient ones. We were shooting for the big rebate, but couldn’t find the proper “high efficiency” fridge that would fit in our kitchen. All of the HE fridges were 35 inches. Oh well.

They delivery guys from Sears did a a great job. Only two minor issues. One was that they scraped my front door. Luckily it was in an inconspicuous area. I give them credit for moving all of that stuff with only that little bit of damage. Of course I already had the path cleared and doors off the hinges before they arrived. The second problem was that the compression fitting for the fridge water line leaked. I had to get pushy with the corporate people in order to get it fixed the same day. The “best they could do for me” would be to send somebody back in 2 weeks to take a look. Yeah right. The same guys came back and fixed it. Very good response in my opinion.