Henrik:
The EU set works really well, particularly when we are talking about the spinning. It's a traditional 5kg washer, 1200 rpm spin. When it starts spinning, it starts slowly going towards the distribution speed, distributes the clothes, accelerates towards a "proof" speed and, if things are unbalanced, it distributes again, otherwise it goes straight into a speed range where most of the water is extracted (200-400 rpm), and if everything looks good it keeps speeding up, otherwise it pauses, tumbles for a bit, tries again.
I am *very* impressed about how it can decide pretty quickly if the load is unbalanced or if it needs to shed more water or if it's suds locked, which it tries to clear in a much faster and efficient way than the other set. Also, if it decides that it has a hard to balance load (one heavy item, for example), it just speeds up to *just* below the critical speed to shed as much water as possible and then accelerates to about 800 rpm as quickly as possible to skip the critical speed. That guarantees a load that is as dry as possible under the circumstances. You can see the drum moving a lot inside the machine, but it doesn't hit anything, despite the vibration on the outer cabinet.
The other set is freaking annoying. It reminds me of the very first versions of Netscape, when you were downloading stuff ("34 minutes... 55 minutes... 10 minutes... It will *never* finish... 5 minutes... done."), particularly the dryer which makes the display jump all over the place. The washer, well, what can I say except it has not broken yet. It washes relatively well but not as well as the EU set, it could rinse much better and no one would complain. The spin is just agonizing to watch, it's the place the machine spends most of the time, most of it trying to balance, including the interim spins. As far as I can tell, no suds sensor, no unbalance sensor, just "the motor is taking more current than average" so it stops, tumbles, tries again. Way too many times, it speeds up just fine, everything is perfectly balanced, but the "is it balanced?" routine involves two ramp downs, one with the motor on, one with the motor off, to compare how fast the ramp down is (which correlates with how unbalanced it is) and I have the impression that happens *even* if the motor current is not indicating any imbalance -- so you can start with a load that is *perfectly* balanced and by the time it's speeding up again it's not balanced anymore, which is infuriating. (BTW, you probably have enough clues right now to even know what brand, model and year we are talking about -- please don't mention any of those, I wish to keep the discussion focused not on the manufacturer's reputation, but on the quality/usability of this particular model.)
This is not a case of they don't have enough room in the cabinet for the internal drums to move, there's plenty of room, nothing is banging. Just spin cycles that take forever and sometimes do not even happen because the machine runs out of numbers of tries or time.
And, like I said, I would love for engineers to actually tell their managers and bosses: "look, you can make it work without this sensor, but you will lose a *client*, which will cost you more than what you are saving right now" -- they save less than 20 bucks, lose a sale that is over 2,000. More, if you consider that I won't be looking at their dishwashers or fridges and I was shopping about 4 years ago for induction range and also did not look at their offerings.
Cheers,
-- Paulo.