POD 5/31/12 WP COMBO with Jimmy & Gloria Stewart

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tomturbomatic

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Isn't this domestic scene precious? Part of the load is folded on top of the combo and part is still in the machine. No doubt Gloria was folding stuff in her suit, pearls and heels when the photographer dropped by to shoot the ad picture.

Fortunate, indeed, are the Stewarts to have the combo on a stone floor so that the gas burner won't char the floor underneath it. I hope this area is far removed from their living area so that the noise does not disturb family activities. Sort of a shame they don't have room for a pair of Whirlpools. Wonder what's behind the sheers on the right; more wall space, maybe?

As for Gloria's claim about how wonderful it is to be able to select the time and temperataure for drying, many separate dryers and several other combos already had auto dry which eliminated selecting the drying time and temperature. When Combos were tested, perhaps by Consumers Research Bulletin, they mentioned the heats available from HIGH to AIR and put "Recommended" in parenthesis next to HIGH since it speeded drying of loads which went into dry so poorly extracted that water could be wrung from them by hand.

We should fire up all of the combos and measure the drying times for loads not additionally extracted, for loads spun in a contemporary WP-made machine and for loads spun in a Unimatic.
 
Tom, there's a window back there. Look near Mrs. Stewart's feet. Pretty combo, pretty couple. How time flies.
 
I met the Stewart's daughter at an event a few years ago and mentioned this ad and that I had it framed and hanging in my laundry room (next to Bing Crosby's Gas Bendix Duomatic ad). She was very familiar with it and said she had a copy of the ad also, and mentioned it was not actually photographed in their home.
 
Sure they say it's a combo. I meant, compared to other combo ads which emphasize and repest "dirty goes in, clean AND dry comes out". The copy emphasizes the separate operations.

Maybe by then buyers knew that yes it was one step from the operator perspective but it took roughly 3 times as long doing it. Twice because obviously it can only do one thing at a time, and 3 because it didn't spin for squat.
 
The key to using a combo effectively was to eliminate washday by doing a load or two a day. People smart enough to learn that were happy with processing laundry through their combos. I talked with Lita Solis-Cohen, the senior editor of Maine Antique Digest. Her husband was a Sears executive and she had two combos, one of the 33" wide machines when her twins were born and then the 29" combo later. She was not happy when the last combo could not be replaced with another. I asked about having the combo to handle the laundry for two babies and she said it was a snap. She put in one load in the morning when the boys napped and one in the afternoon. If you stuck to a schedule like that, you did not have a week's worth of laundry piled up waiting for the machine to complete each load. Every combo owner's manual emphasized this.

I guess if you had sudden large amounts of laundry like when we came home from summer trips with a week's worth of laundry it might be a strain, but on the other hand, there were no linens or towels since those were the motels' concern so it was only summer weight clothing and that would be done and packed for our next trip on Monday.

I will tell you one secret I discovered over the years of using combos. If you did have multiple loads to do and wanted to be done in the fastest time, it was better to just wash each load then start drying them. You start drying with the light weight fabrics like permanent press loads. Once all of that heavy drum and outer tub is heated up and dry, the dryer is amazingly fast. Loads of shirts or king sheets were done in 15 minutes and I would start taking them out at the start of the cooldown to save as much heat as possible. By the time you were ready to dry towels, they would dry in hardly any time at all. If I did not need to rush, I still made use of the stored heat in the machine by starting to wash the colors first. After they had dried and did not go through the whole cooldown, I would start a load of whites with the machine all nice and hot. It would actually raise the temperature of the wash water just from the heat in the drum and outer tub. If I did not have whites to wash, I could wash colors on cold fills and have warm water wash from the leftover heat. This was when I had an electric water heater so the combo saved some energy.
 
Sounds like I could do that w/ a separate set of machines: Do my towels last after doing the rest of my clothes ie. washing AND drying them afterwards...

(Though that may have been what I was occasionally doing all along...)

Kind'a wondering "if" and/or "when" the Combo may make a come-back?

-- Dave
 
Combos and Cycle Speed

The gas WP Combo featured in the ad was actually fairly fast in spite of very poor extraction during the spin cycle. This Combo was one of the most powerful dryers ever marketed for home use with its 37,000 BTU gas burner. A light load of clothing could be washed and dried in about an hour and heavier loads took an hour and a half, about the same time it takes a modern FL washer to just wash a load LOL.

 

The electric version was much slower as it only had 5600 watts of power available so it could take an extra 1/2 hour with most loads than the gas version. On some of the Sears versions of this machine they allowed the option on the electric models of connecting the machine to a 50 AMP line as these models had an extra heater and gave you 8400 watts of drying power which really helped close the drying speed gap between the gas and electric versions.
 
A light load of clothing could be washed and dried in about

The Perry Como program was sponsored by Dupont at one time. One evening, at the start of the show, they showed a new Acrilan blanket being put into a WP combo like this. The ad line was that this blanket could be machine washed and dried in the hour that the program ran without shrinking, matting or pilling. So the thing was started and they went to the music. At each commercial break, they showed blanket going round and round in the combo. Of course, the blanket did not get a very long wash, being fresh out of the box and sure enough, by the show's end, they were pulling a dry blanket out of the combo. I don't know what it proved since the camera was not on the combo the whole time and anyone could have switched the wet blanket with a dry one once the dry cycle started, but it was a neat demo for me as an appliance boy to watch. Hot diggity dog diggity, boom what you do to me.
 

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