Miele W1 - WKF 120 WPS
I'm really getting to like this machine.
The main advantage is that it can do a very effective cottons cycle in an hour.
Pros:
* Excellent build quality. (Stainless steel inner drum and outer tank, cast iron counterbalance weights, excellent shocks, springs, built on a chassis, extremely good quality cabinet finishes that don't rust etc)
* Fast, effective wash cycles.
* Very good wash and rinse results (although default rinse levels are low, but they are programmable).
* Quiet / Near silent - quiet pumps (it has two of them), quiet motor, quite mechanical components.
* Dual coin trap/button trap filters at front. These are self-cleaning other than for large items e.g. coins, buttons, clips etc.
* Very stable (no vibration).
* Respectable load size and you can stuff it very full and it will wash perfectly.
* No nonsense spinning - it just balances quickly and goes.
* Easy to use
* Great features : water meter fill (it knows exactly how many litres it's using and can show you) energy meter (shows you kWh used)
* Powerful recirculation pump and jet.
Cons:
* Powerwash 60 which it is marketed with is really not very good at rinsing! It does ONE fairly aggressive rinse, but it's not enough.
Cotton Wash set at "Short" with "Water Plus" solves this problem and gives you a really very effective wash and lots of rinsing in 61 minutes.
* Default options are all set for quite stingy rinsing, but you can adjust them. It took a day or two to notice this though.
* Quite expensive.
* They dropped the drain filter tube which Miele always had so it now just trickles water down a flap, more like 'lesser' machines.
* Fussier about cycle interruptions than older Mieles - you can press 'start / stop' and select 'add laundry' for the first few minutes of the wash, but after that the door will not open unless you cancel the cycle and start again.
* Requires you to press "Start/Stop" to open the door on some cycles where it has an anti-wrinkle tumble. This isn't intuitive and I've had family members trying to pull the door (very hard!) thinking it was stuck. I think this may be a design error as they've historically had a "door" button to open the door rather than a pull door.
Overall, it's an excellent machine but I think there may be one or two early-adopter minor 'bugs' (well more like minor design oversights like the start/stop button requirement) to be worked out, perhaps in the new software which I might be able to get uploaded onto it if I ask nicely
