Washing Machines - What to Look for?

[mollymoo]

OK, well that's fair enough, if you repair a lot you probably know more than me.

Just seems that whenever people ask for advice on these sorts of things, says for example, "I have a budget of £300", then straight away people are going "Oh no, don't go for a **** cheap brand, splash out another £600 and buy an expensive German one instead!" which to a lot of people is just totally out of budget.

Anyway, I'm probably just chatting beans now so I'm going to bow out there.

I bought a Bosch, it cost £300 delivered \o/

 

[Pug]

I bought a Siemens recently (with matching tumble) both very good, too early to say if its lasting though!

 

[insane200]

I bought a Siemens recently (with matching tumble) both very good, too early to say if its lasting though!

Probably the same lifetime as a bosch, being its all the same.

Miele are good machines and there definatly worth the extra, my machine is currently 8 years old and NEVER had a problem, my mums is older, the chap i work with who got us into selling Miele has a 35year old washer and slightly younger dishwasher, he also has fridge/freezer and cookers from them all which have had NO faults.

you can get a good miele for around £650 and keep it for years or you could buy a cheap machine every few years for £250-300 i know what i would buy.

 

[HangTime]

Beko seem to have a lot which on the face look good and quite gadgety however I’ve always considered Beko to be a cheap make and not sure about reliability of them.

I consider them a cheap make as well but we've had ours for over 5 years in two different houses with no problems. It even looks reasonably modern and funky, if that matters to you.

I tend to approach buying most things (not just white goods, but electrical items, computer hardware etc too) the same way; decide on a mimimum specification level that I want, and then buy one of the cheaper models with that specification (or better spec for the same money as 'expensive' brands), assuming they don't have bad reviews or a lot of horror stories.

The way I look at it, if my Beko washing machine packs up tomorrow (which it shows no signs of doing so) it will probably have done over 1000 washes working out at about 25p capital expenditure per wash... obviously you have to take efficiency into consideration but as I said it was decent spec so should hold it's own on that front.

Don't get me wrong if there were some deals on and somebody lined up a Bosch and a Beko with the same spec for the same money I'd go for the former, but when I've been in the market (only once for washing machines, thankfully!) that hasn't been the case.