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GE Air Freshener button

Ken will know for sure but I think they were small aerosol metal bottles that sprayed out a squirt of goodness.  Probably to cover up the smell of the cigarette you were holding while starting the dryer ;-)

 

IIRC, if you pull the toggle out, the small canister was inserted into the panel (?)  It's been a long time since I saw one.

 
 
Air Freshener feature

It's a curious little gimcrack: there is indeed a small pressurized canister-ette of air freshener that gets squirted directly into the body of the backsplash when the user presses the KEY (GE's term for those over-sized white plastic toggles) downward. Purely by aerodynamics, the chemical gets sucked downwards through the hollow pedestals into the dryer's air stream to do its job. In the 1957 model there was a little pan behind the switch that held a solid tablet like the ones they still sell for some vacuum cleaners. In that model there was a flexible rubber tube that conducted the juice to the dryer drum.

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A couple of questions please re: the GE bleach dispenser.  I understand that the lever pumps the bleach from the reservoir to the measuring display cup. When is the bleach added to the load?   What if I pumped a measured amount of bleach into the measuring display cup and changed my mind and wanted to wash colors first instead of whites is there a second maneuver that releases the measured bleach?  Or once you pumped the bleach is there no turning back and you had to proceed with the LCB appropriate load? Does the FL in the Westinghouse Laundromat thread work the same way?  Thanks in advance.  JC your "old" and "new" GE's are really nice congrats.  Maybe the LCB would only dispense if you use toggle/program number 1?  Thanks A
 
The bleach is added to the wash water via a tube at the beginning of the last 5 minutes of the WASH period. Once you've pumped the bleach from the reservoir into the dispenser there's no way to stop it (without disassembling the machine and the instructions for dealing with the bleach dispenser are long and complicated, they even included special tools for it attached to the inside of the masonite panel on the back of the machine); whatever is in the the dispenser will be added to the wash water. You can hear the solenoid click at the 5 minute mark. For some reason GE changed from this reservoir design to what they called a timed "one shot" design in the middle of the 1962 model year. The two machines pictured below are the same vintage, but you can see in the second picture, the lever and the gauge are missing; the user simply measured the right amount of bleach for that particular load into the dispenser and it was added at the 5 minute mark. The second model down from the TOL usually had what GE called a bleach "funnel" under the lid that looked like a conventional dispenser port for a top loader.

bajaespuma-2016030212101701380_1.jpg

bajaespuma-2016030212101701380_2.jpg
 
Ken, that later one

looks to be identical to the one mounted on the Combos? Is it? Is that a '63-'64 model? It also looks like they reinstalled the larger older control dial compared to the machine I have??

 

  

Yes I found out that bleach once opened goes to salt water within in a month, if its not sealed all the time. This dispenser is open to the air all the time.  And I bet housewives weren't going through a gallon a month. So that pretty much would have made it useless. 

 

Also I bet this dispenser was expensive to make and install in the factory. And they already had one the combos. Why not use that one?

 
 
Bleach dispenser

 

 

 

They probably would have been better off leaving a suction hose out so people could put it into their own bottle of bleach.  

Then the pump could have simply sucked up the right amount of bleach and when the bottle became empty, there wouldn't have been any chamber in the machine to get gunked up.

 

We need to get in the Appliance time machine, and go back to help the engineers realize, it could have been better.  Oh well.
 
Oh, pshaw.

Jon, both of those were 1962 models; the first one was a prototype from the beginning of the model year and was a WA-1050W, the second one is from the end of the model year and belongs to a member here. It has a slightly different model number because of the new-style bleach dispenser. Otherwise, they're identical machines. Your 1050-V is likely from the early side of 1961 production because later on in the year, they added a small "V-12" badge to the panel. Your beautiful combo is either from 1963 (if there's an "X" suffix, or it's from 1964 (or even 1965 maybe); that dark gray panel lasted for a while).

 

In our household, that fancy-schmancy bleach dispenser would have worked just fine. For a family of 4+, our Filter-Flo saw at least 8 loads a week and easily half of them were bleached loads. I don't know how long it would have lasted given that even without a bleach dispenser the sides of the cabinet were pretty rusty by the end of 16 years, but both the washer and the dryer were still working when we left. GE tried a reservoir dishwasher detergent dispenser many years later on some of it's TOL dishwashers and that was short-lived as well. You would think GE would have a decent learning curve. And now they want to be the Queens of software. Oy.
 
Here ya go

A series of washing in the NEW IMPROVED 1961 GE Filter Flo---

 

 

We are featuring John Coldspot66 today. Star of Modern GE washing, - he introduced me to post 1950's GE living !!

 

 

<iframe src="" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
 
 

From the ladies magazines I frequently read, I'm told this new 1961 model gets the clothes 300% cleaner than that old 1960 model.  All I can say is I'm sold.  I need to get a New 1961 GE Filter-Flo washer ASAP.

 

 

Hey-y-y, wait a minute.  That drain line doesn't look like an authentic black-rubber-with-metal-coil-on-outside hose !  What's going on here ? 
 

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