My Letter to Electrolux

About 18 months ago I posted about how excited I was to be getting an Electrolux washer and dryer.  I am now sharing my letter to Electrolux customer service so you can read  about what a nightmare their dryer has been for me over the past 15 months.  I liked this dryer a lot, with a few exceptions up until last Fall.  Once Fall hit, I quickly came to hate my washer, for which we sacrificed a trip to Disney World.  I can tell you now, the washer and dryer are not worth the $3,400 dollars that we spent on them.  Please, save yourself the aggravation and skip the Electrolux machines if/when you are in the market for a new washer and dryer. I will upload pictures of the machine and the damage it caused sometime soon.

Here is the letter to Electrolux:
I am writing to you today to tell you about my experience with my gas Electrolux Dryer (Model EIGD55HIW0 Serial ************).  I have owned this dryer for slightly over eighteen months and very fortunately my husband and I had the foresight to purchase an extended warranty for the machine.  Sadly, this dryer is a laundry nightmare.  When we purchased it, I was hopeful that it would live up to all the advertising hype which undoubtably has cost your company quite a lot of money to generate.

Let me tell you why I despise my Electrolux dryer.  Approximately four days after my dryer was installed I noticed the honeycomb grate in the back of the dryer becoming discolored.  It started out as a golden rust color.  At first I thought perhaps the copper color from the buttons on denim pants was somehow rubbing off on the grate.  Then as the weeks progressed I began to wonder if the grate was simply cheap metal and was actually rusting.  It didn't make any sense that a new machine that never had wet clothing left on it for more than a couple of minutes before the dryer was started would be rusting.  My husband suggested that maybe the heat of the dryer was simply discoloring  the metal grate.  On any account, I didn't think it warranted a call to customer service.  At the time, it simply appeared to be a cosmetic issue, and not something the required repair or replacement.

Time progressed and the discoloration on the honeycomb grate grew larger and darker.  I began to notice odd black marks on our clothing when I folded the laundry.  I interrogated my young children and asked if any had placed black crayons in their pockets and subsequently into the laundry.  They hadn't.  To be sure, I banned the use of all crayons in our house for a short period of time and hid them.  The black marks continued to show up on our clothes.  Some of the marks could be picked off and others had penetrated the fabric rendering them destroyed and not suitable to wear out of the house.

Then as the colder months came upon us and fleece sweatshirts and other polyester clothing became more prevalent in the laundry, I noticed that the black residue on the honeycomb grate had grown thicker and was covering most of the holes on the lower right hand side of the honeycomb grate.  It was at that point that I began to notice honeycomb grate marks on polyester sweatshirts, pajamas and blankets.  I had one load of laundry where over $100 worth of new clothing articles (2 GAP fleece hooded sweatshirts, and 2 sets of Carter's fleece pajamas) had been melted in at least one area, all of them conspicuous.  Some items were rendered totally unwearable before they had even been worn once.  In the coming months, I came to see every set of my childrens' fleece pajamas melted, branded with the dryer's honeycomb calling card, or singed.  That's approximately 30 sets of pajamas ruined over the course of a single winter.

This past Spring my younger daughter's blanket (her lovey which she has had since she was a new born) was melted in several areas by the abomination your company sells as a clothes dryer.  My child was devastated that her blanket was now hard and crusty in many places where it used to be soft and fluffy.

When washing my king sized comforter a couple months ago, the dryer burned a large brown spot onto the white cotton fabric and left black streaks of melted polyester from the honeycomb grate all over.  The comforter was dried using your "bulky bedding" setting and I had been pulling the comforter our and repositioning it every 15 minutes to avoid it becoming damaged.  I was stunned at how much damage this dryer could do in a single 15 minute interval.

The final straw with this dryer came on Monday of this week when I pulled my daughter's brand new pink velour dress out of the laundry and discovered that her pretty dress was melted and branded with honeycomb imprints in over ten places.  The dress had been worn for Thanksgiving day and was going to be worn to church on Christmas Eve.  Now the dress is ruined and she will not get to wear the once very pretty dress ever again.  She was incredibly upset when she learned that the dress is no longer able to be worn.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I am totally incensed and enraged about this sorry excuse for a dryer.  I did not purchase an Electrolux washer and dryer and sacrifice a family vacation to buy these machines to make doing laundry a never ending nightmare of clothing destruction.  I purchased your product because I believed it was a machine that would perform better than the Kenmore washer and dryers I have owned in the past.  I realize now that buying an Electrolux set was a grave mistake.  The dryer alone has destroyed enough clothing and bedding to have purchased another dryer from another manufacturer.

The repair man from Lowes (where we purchased the machine and the extended warrant plan) came out today and told us this melting of polyester clothing is a very common problem with the Electrolux dyers.  I wasn't amused to find out that we're not alone in this misery.  Next friday the repair man will be out again to replace the honeycomb grate.  He tells us that the melting problem will continue (even after the repair), unless of course, I don't put any polyester articles in the dryer.  I purchased this dryer to dry our clothes, not to sit in my laundry room and look pretty while the clothes air dry on a line.

I only use this dryer on the low setting, so I'm rather bewildered as to how my clothes are melting. I could maybe understand the melting clothes if I were drying the clothes on a setting that wasn't recommended on the care labels, but, I dry everything on low which more often than not is a cooler setting than what is suggested.  The dryer is typically run for 45 minutes, and clothes such as denim pants which take a bit longer to dry are then put back in the machine for an additional 15.

This machine alarms me because I fear that it is potentially a fire hazard.  When clothes melt to the back grate are they not creating a situation where a fire could result?  I would hate to lose my home or my children because of a machine that seems like it should be recalled.

And finally, I'd like to know what Electrolux is going to do to make me happy.  I have lost hundreds of dollars in clothing and bedding because of this faulty dryer, and based on what my repair man tells me, I'm going to continue to see our clothing be destroyed.  To date, this machine has damaged or destroyed at least $900 worth of clothes.  Many items destroyed, such as my daughter's blanket, have sentimental value attached to them as well.  This dryer has caused me more aggravation and grief than I can fully express in this letter.

I thank you for taking the time to read my concerns and complaints about this dryer, and I anxiously await your reply of how Electrolux is going to rectify my problems and losses.

Warmest Regards,
Karen G****

I Love Lucy Moments

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if we're all sort of a source of entertainment for God.  If we are, then I'm God's idea of a twisted comedy show.

All day I've wanted to write a blog about my weekend.  It was long and jam packed with lots of things that left me thoroughly exhausted.  More than forty eight hours after Mass on Saturday night and my body is still feeling the effects of holding a sleeping 40+ pound child.  So I'm now painfully aware that my baby isn't much of a baby anymore.  I think I need a lighter model.  I like to mull over major life changing decisions, so production of a new model hasn't been fully discerned yet.  My stumbling block on this issue is I'm not sure I can part with the few shreds of sanity that I still have. I can't keep the names of two kids straight.  It is unlikely that I will remember the name of an additional child, unless I go with the name "Whoever You Are" and that name is already heavily in use when talking to Ellie.  Poor child.

I started off my day trying to clean up the kitchen after the sword fighting fiasco.  The kitchen table, chairs and floor were splattered with cranberry juice that wasn't spilled if I'm to go with the answer I was given by Madeline last night and this morning.  Ellie told me what happened last night when I picked her up from school today.  Apparently Madeline's friend knocked the juice cup over with the sword and then the visiting friends ran out of the house like bats from Hell.  Nice friends.  Madeline didn't want to get in trouble so she decided deception was the way to go.  She clearly didn't think that I'd notice the cranberry stained towel in the laundry and she must have forgotten that her little sister who witnessed the event has a pretty good command of the English language.  She came clean this afternoon when I told her about the mess I cleaned this morning.  Looks like she's got a date coming up with her favorite parish priest.

My entire day and all the craziness that occurred stem directly from the juice incident.  My morning alone was devoted to cleaning a mess that was thrice denied.  Then I started on the laundry.  Or, I should say I tried to start the laundry.  That's when I realized that the washer needed to be cleaned.  My washer has a system clean setting to clean out the drum.  I've ignored this prompt a couple times and decided that I needed to do a system clean before doing another load.  Unfortunately, I didn't trust that the system clean had actually happened when I returned to the laundry room and loaded the washer.  It smelled like fresh bleach so I decided to take out the clothes and do a system clean.  Turns out I totally blanked on the fact that I had put detergent in the dispenser.  When I came back into the laundry room I had a washer filled with suds a la I Love Lucy.  Thinking that the bubbles would pop when I put the clothes in the washer I decided to push the clothes in and get on with the laundry.  For those of you who are wondering, suds happily move out of the way instead of popping.  It was a total I Love Lucy moment courtesy of Era HE detergent (I thought HE detergent was supposed to be low suds!) and Electrolux.

Once I got past the suds situation, I decided I should go into the utility closet and empty the frying pan that catches all the drips from the hot water heater that likes to leak.  It's a task that we have to do 1-2 times a day.  If we forget to empty the pan we wind up with a small flood.  Sadly, I walked in on a large puddle that took three full sized bath towels to soak up.  The kicker is that Bryan emptied the pan which holds well over a half gallon of liquid less than 24 hours before.  We really need to get a tankless water heater installed.

I've had a long day and I'm exhausted.  Sticky floor, sand coated child, super suds, mini flood, and neighborhood kids doing stupid things on my backyard swing set clearly trying to prove that Girls' Jackass may someday be a show on MTV.  Through it all I have maintained my composure and patience.

I'll be back in business tomorrow.

The laundry business that is.

We went to Lowes this morning and brought a new washer and dryer.  I've been eyeing up the Electrolux product line for close to a year now, but I didn't want to spend the money on them.  They're pricey and buying them when I had functioning machines didn't exactly make sense.  Since our washer decided to bite the dust yesterday, we had no choice but to buy a new one.  It didn't make sense to me to get a fancy new washer and keep the dryer that has seen better days (I think it's been leaking gas since we moved here 23 months ago--not good, I know).  So off we went to Lowes to buy a new washer and dryer.  Bryan decided to spring for the pedestals, too.  I'll get to put all my laundry stuff in one area instead of having to use my Ikea shelving for laundry stuff.  

While I got the washer and dryer that I wanted, I did have to sacrifice aesthetics to save some money.  I really wanted a blue or aqua washer and dryer, but it's not worth accruing debt to get a cool color.  So I got plain old boring white, but the folks at Electrolux gave their white a cool name.  It's "Island White".  I would have loved to have had the Mediterranean Blue appliances, but it wasn't worth spending over $300 for a cool color.  No one ever goes in my laundry room so I guess the color doesn't matter.  And really, it's not like I'm going to start showing off my unfinished basement laundry room to everyone that stops by.  So even if I did have the cool color, no one would see it.

Since we have a bad track record with washers, we opted to buy the extended warranty.  So we should be good for the next 5 years.  I'm hoping that the new machines will last me at least 10 years.  That would be really nice and would make the price a little easier to swallow.