Heresy
It wasn't until I had my first Maytag (an A206 with helical drive) that it occurred to me that Consumer Reports wasn't as objective as one would think or expect. Although I wasn't a CU technician, my interest in these machines, as with a lot of us, was serious and I had enough experience in the laundry room to judge some of the differences for myself between the basic Maytag which kept garnering top place in the CU reports and the Filter-Flo's that consistently placed down in the middle of their ratings.
My first impression was that the Maytags, although I thought they were elegant machines, were overrated. Our GE's had always done a clearly superior job at cleaning clothing and also at rinsing, something that wasn't even measured by CU. The Maytags weren't bad, overall, but the agitation was ineffective with big loads, the kind of loads that everyone but the lady of the household would subject the family washing machine to normally and frequently. Our GE never slowed down or stalled with big loads the way I've seen many a Tag do. Maytag rinsing has always been skimpy. Again, if you have a serious load in those machines, you are lucky if they'll turn over even once during that 2 minute rinse. The Filter-flo rinse on the normal cycle was always about 4 minutes long and, again, that powerful activation moved that laundry up and down with ease. GE's lint filter was also a better design than the Maytags, but the more I think about lint, the more it's a non-issue.
I think this comparison is fair, also for Whirlpools although I was always disappointed by how ineffective extraction was with the BD pools and kenmores.
True, Maytags are engineered beautifully, dependable and quiet. But I always thought Filter-Flo's were much better than what Consumer Reports reported
