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Austin Aubinoe's avatar

Appliance Land is a very good source for stuff like this, the only thing comparable to the old heavy duty washers is Speed queen. Specifically their Classic Clean series that still uses a transmission. Also If you ever have a control board go bad, I use a very good shop near baltimore that can repair them. (very rarely do proprietary chips go bad, generally it's just generic relays and capacitors that fry). It's called US Electronics Repairs, a bunch of older TV repair guys run it.

Finally, I currently have a pair of 1995 Whirlpool HD units that I bought used 5 years ago when I first bought my house. I learned to make repairs on them using Appliance parts pros.com They have very good videos and OEM parts at a good price. I heard the combo units are much harder to work on. But with that site your not a compleat slave to the repairman.

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Andy's avatar

Quite the adventure! If I may, there may be one other reason why washer/dryer sizes of the ones you are looking for are no longer made. It's possible that the market, while it exists, isn't large enough to have a large enough ROI for the manufacture and sale of that particular size range. In a way, it might have a weird tie-in with housing policy, in that a majority of dwellings in the US seem to be either single-family units that are large enough for a full-size washer/dryer, or else are apartments that can only take the combined units like the one you wound up with. So, in this case, it could just be the appliance market responding to the incentives provided by the housing market, though it wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn of a anti-consumer motive among the manufacturers.

It's interesting that you brought up John Deere...growing up in the 1990s, my family relied on a pair of early 1950's vintage John Deere Model M tractors for a variety of tasks on our 13 acres. Turns out, it's hard to get a medium-sized tractor in that size range, as everything is either gigantic (designed for 100s of acres) or else just a glorified lawn mower! That seems to have changed a bit in the last 10 or so years, it seems, but then there are still the issues of dealing with modern John Deere's predatory maintenance policies. Those classic JD tractors will run just about forever, and when something does break, you can fix it in a garage with relatively basic tools. Plus, unlike with appliances, there are in fact tractor junkyards out there to get parts from!

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