So, Combo52 and I were talking the other day

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Hi Jon, I assume that that lint from the FF washer was dried in an oven or at least 140 degrees before weighing so the moisture would be similar to the dryer lint used in your test. I also like Louis idea about using different color lint from the dryer supply vs the load being washed as I am sure that a lot of the dryer lint disappeared through the GE FF pan.

 

Neutral drain washers are like drip coffee makers vs spin drain washers?   All I can say is ignorance is bliss, LOL.
 
Okay Phil & Louis & John

We can try this : Dry red items and then extract the red lint for the filter pan. Then wash with no clothes in tub, see what is left behind. Next repeat and wash with white items and compare remainder lint in color and weight.

 

Filtering the drian hose is not practical for me as I use stand pipes.

 

Plus the force of water out the drain pipe is much higher than filterflo flumes , the drain side of the pump might force a lot of lint through and down the drain.

 

Hmmmmm
 
I think that one reason for the effectiveness of the early Filter Flo systems was that the lint-laden water overflowed from the top of the tub to be carried into the pump instead of being pulled out from a low point in the outer tub in the perforated tub machines. Even Maytag, when they were justifying their cheap solution to lint filtering in machines that really created a lot of lint with their harsh agitation, said that most of the lint was near the top of the water so that was the logical place for a lint filter. Well, yes, if it was not powered by the pump. I still remember the 1958 report on washers where CU called it largely ineffectual. Hotpoint repeated it when touting their filter that fit on the agitator just below the water level of a full fill.

You will want to make sure the the contrasting color lint is colorfast in your experiment or you will have pink fabrics with red lint.

I have never liked static drain top load washers and in my opinion the best thing about the DD WP-made machines was their ability to shift into a spin drain with a lift of the lid.
 
I still like the idea of simply adding a couple grams of collected lint to an empty load and seeing how much gets caught. Seems like the job of the filter is to pull the lint out of the water and starting with a known quantity and seeing the effectiveness of the filtration in this manner makes for an easy test. I'd love to test out the likely ineffective bed-o-nails in my belt drive WP this way. I don't have access to a scale that can split grams though. I've only ever weighed bicycle parts to the nearest gram...

My concern with using dryer lint is that I believe its consistency tends to be finer then what is typically pulled from a wash load. The lint screen in the dryer becomes more efficient (as do ALL barrier air filters) as lint loads the screen and reduces the effective aperture size. A good portion of the weight of dryer lint may be tiny dust like particles (the ones you see floating when you clean the screen) which I don't think any washer filter will trap.

The FilterFlo pan has the drawback of oscillating while filtering. My suspicion is that this will reduce effectiveness as it allows some of the lint to work its way through the filter. Still they could be quite effective though, especially so on larger lint and hair.

I have pondered adding an external lint filter to a machine before. I'd likely use a large area screen in a bag filter housing. Something with a number of square inches of filter area so that it could hold a lot without restricting flow. Perhaps someday I will get a round-tuit and try that although I have an ultrasonic cleaner idea that might come first ;)
 
Phil, judging from the way the lint balls up in the oscillating filter pan, I think the action of the water and the movement of the pan serve to form the lint into balls and possibly make it less likely to go through the holes, especially in the regular, deep plastic filter pan. The pan with the solid dish in Jon's machine has different water action because water cannot escape except nearer the perimeter and, when the spin begins, there is water in the center dish that is spun out over the filter pan forcing the collected lint closer to or over the lip of the pan.
 
Yes that worried me Tom

That pan does drain differently than the solid tub machines did, but I watched the whole load and did not see lint balls flung over the side, nor when it stopped on rinse fill did I see lint globs in the tub. But I could have missed something.

 

Yes Louis I could use the '67 Frigidaire beside it. Good idea.

 

 
 
So lets ALL

construct a new test.

Proposal 1:

  I dry a whopping amount of clothes in the SQ, save a whopping amount of multicolored lint. 

DRY THE LINT AT 140 for 10 days! 

  then Weigh the lint 5 times.

 Then throw it into a water full --no laundry-- tub in the GE. 

Run machine.

 collect lint in pan

 DRY THE LINT AT 140 DEGREES FOR 10 days!

 then weigh the lint 

 

 What say? 
DISCUSS!

 
 
Jon, you sound like you have been inhaling too many fumes from your sudsless detergent. The idea is good and does not have to be carried to the extreme just because you are being goaded by some who need to prove something. The GE washer, since FilterFlo was introduced, has usually earned the comment that it left loads with less lint than many other washers. It was the first to introduce lint filtering to the American laundry industry and deserves credit for that, but I think that a good dryer plays an important part in lint removal as do proper laundering methods like sufficient amounts of a good detergent, soft or softened water and a fabric softener when the load can benefit from one. I believe that a dryer removes a different type of lint than does a washer because some types of lint are more easily removed in the washer and some types are more easily removed in the dryer. A friend who had one of those very low end GE washers with no lint filter got a lot of lint in her dryer's lint screen, but did not have lint on the clothes after they were dried. Of course, this was back in the 60s when detergents had phosphates and did not have the tendency to leave scuz on fabrics, especially dark colors.
 
Tom, your comments are spot on that the washer and dryer each are more effective at removing different kinds of lint. The combination of two appliances increases the overall lint removal from the fabric. Of course the story changes a bit if the clothing is being line dried...

Due to the different environments in each machine any attempt to compare lint capture between the washer and dryer is a bit silly. Also unless you are filtering the waste water from the waher and exhaust air from the dryer we have no idea how much was removed from the load but was missed from either appliance's filter. Although in the end as long as its gone it doesn't much matter too much where it went.

Just as we compare extraction ability in washers, lint removal/filter performance is something that we could test to compare that aspect of different washers. Comparing washers to one another is a fair test, and might make a difference to pet owners and people that line dry their clothing. It would be interesting to develop a reasonably repeatable test and run it on a few washers just to see how they each compare to each other.
 
Phil, I can tell you from operating electric dryers unvented to the outside in my house during the winter, that lots of lint escapes lint screens. On two of the dryers, the KA and the Hamilton, I have a pair of pantyhose over the end of the vent and both final filters collect a lot of lint as the air slows down and escapes the fine nylon net. It is very similar to studies of how much sediment is carried by fast moving water and how the heavier particles settle out first as the water slows a bit and then finer particles settle out as the water slows even more. I dare say that if the GE washer were drained into a tub, lint would settle to the bottom within a few hours. The KA dryer exhaust from its strong blower passes through two filter boxes with metal screen filters before entering the nylon and the two legs of the pantyhose still collect a lot of lint as do the three screens in front of it so, yes, the end discharge of the dryer as well as of the washer would have to be filtered to see how much lint is being trapped by the lint filter of each appliance, except that it is really not worth it.
 
Good point about the

filter pans, Tom, I found watching the 1960 and 1956 GE FF's that the copper pan with the rounded edge makes nice round balls of lint, but the plastic sharp cornered 1960's pans create sort of flattened lint ovoids not balls. The 1970 machine oscillates so fast on regular wash that I get clumps of tiny seperate balls all lumped together, kind of like beebee's. Beebee ball lint!

 

On the Kenmore's with the flush lint system I wonder if how much lint stays in the lint filter and how much is backflushed out? John you should do a study on that.

 
 
The lint pan in the test, does it have a gutter of sorts around the outer rim? If so, it may be protecting the collected lint from the sifting power of the agitation... Do you have a gutter-less FF pan?
 
laughable conjecture

Leave it to one of our members to come up with such a laughable experiment to "prove" his premise that lint filters on some washers have little to no outcome on wash results.

Somehow he thinks putting dryer lint in a filter-flo plan proves this???

Only someone with enough ignoranance to say GE's time-tested and proved tower wash couldn't clean dishes in the corner of racks could come up with such a useless (and pointless) experiment. :)

Conjecture, without evidence, is just a meaningless exercise. If he doesn't think that a lint filter, on more recent Filter-Flo's, has any outcome of clothes cleanliness or freedom from lint he should do an experiment. Opinions without data have little meaning.

At least do design an experiment that has some logic and practicality. Try doing several loads of similar composition in a GE Filter-Flow with and without the filter pan.

About I stated "cleanliness" as well as freedom from lint, as things such as dog hair and cat hair when left on clothes would in some people's mind be associated with cleanliness. The filter-flo pans excel in this.

When washing my bed clothing in my filter-flo and my 1-18 I get sizeable amounts of cat hair, from my five feline friends, in the lint filters of each.

Also I have been known (which I hate to admit) to leave things in my pockets, such as grocery lists, Kleenexes, chash register receipts, etc. in my pockets. These often get reduced to specks of paper and are caught in the filter-flo pan.

Whether these would have stuck to the bedclothes or been washed down the drain, I don't know so I am not going to guess on the outcome, as this would be conjecture. Solely my opinion with no basis in reality. I suppose that would be a worthwhile experiment. Maybe one day I will try it. Until then I am not going to give an opinion as my opinion would have no observational backing. That's not what we are here for.

It doesn't take much of an I.Q. to be spouting opinions all the time in order to build one's ego. It takes a little more intelligence to withhold opinion until one has at least some physical, or practical basis for it.

It can be difficult to come up with the perfect experiment, as there are often variables we don't account for. There can also be experimenter bias, which can happen (almost at a subconscious level) in the way the results and reporting of them can be biased to show what the experimenter was aiming to show.

As I mentioned above, one of our members made the ludicrous comment that GE tower washes could not clean in the corners of the top racks, when relying on the power tower alone. Just that statement alone defies logic, as the tower wash system has been in use in their two door model machines since the early 1960's. These machines have certainly been best sellers with the consumer for well over forty years. They have often been rated over Whirlpool, Kitchen-Aid and Maytag machines in washability by CU over the years.

So my experiment was not perfect, but as you saw from the pictures I posted of my GE 1200 some months past. The tower scrubbed off baked on cocoa fudge, with ease, in cups in the corner of the racks, when I had blocked the lower wash arm spray to the upper racks with pots. At least the experiment was based on normal consumer use of the machine and I tried to duplicate it.

I can't see too many practical ramifications in putting dryer lint in a filter-flow pan. I guess to the person who thought of this experiment, he thought it would fail and would in some twisted way show he is the king of the Automatic Washer site and his opinion means more than everyone else's, even though these opinions often have no basis in rationality. This person delights in building up machines he likes, whether they be dishwashers, disposers or washing machines, and putting down what many others like.

We are on this site to share information and have a good time doing so. When someone is spouting opinions all the time to build himself up and to put others down, this is not right.

When you ask them to support their opinion he can't validate them but will often site generalities about their years of "experience" or experience of the "customers". When asked for data, he often fabricates it. (as in the case of a GE DW motor being 30 percent efficient. When asked to give the source of this laughable data he got suddenly mum.) He couldn't give the source because he fabricated it in an attempt to prove make his unsubstantiated opinion look as if it had supporting mathematical data. I also don't mean to put anyone down. We all want to be noticed and we all have egos. That's part of being human. But we don't always have to be degrading others, and their ideas to do so. (which I guess is what I'm doing, too.)

So it could very well be that the cleanliness and lint load of washed clothes may be no different in a GE Filter-Flo with and without the filter pan. I am not going to say one way or another as I have no empirical data to share and with which to form an opinion. It would be a fun experiment! I hope someone tries it.
 
I deleted the above post due to the fact that I consider that a personal attack. Guys please remember personal attacks are not allowed in the forums, especially the public forums. I don't catch all of them but when I do I will delete it as it's just not necessary.

Stating facts is a good thing, but making it personal is a really bad thing. In this particular case the it was directed against a good friend of the owner of this website (meaning Fred and I) but that doesn't make any difference, any personal attack is not allowed no matter who it is.

Thanks to those who marked this as offensive to alert me.
 

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