My question is: why a Speed Queen?


I will try to be brief.
This started because the Lady Kenmore Washer and Dryer I bought my wife 23 years ago finally wore out.
She did not want a Front Loader or an HE machine. Especially when her friends told her they tended to tear up clothes.
The salesman at a local appliance store who told us no new machine would last more than 7 years regardless of price didn’t help much either.

She liked the Catalyst machines she saw years ago so I found a pair on Craigslist.
They looked good but had some problems which wound up being a slow torture of one thing leading to another.

I would fix one thing only to get it back together and a few weeks later have something else fail- ( ie: Keypads, Control Boards, Drive Baskets, Clutch, Tub Ring, Heavily rusted inner tub that broke while trying to remove the Drive Block, etc etc etc).

Every repair involved taking the doors off our Laundry Room and taking it apart on the hardwood floor in our Living Room.
This happened 6 times in the last 12 months and each time I was repairing a machine under the worse circumstances imaginable and my wife was back at the Laundromat while I waited for parts.

I thought one day I would either replace all the weak parts or at worse build a new machine out of parts
As long as I did not replace the same part twice I figured there would eventually be an end to it.

The Drive Basket destroyed that illusion.

It always played out the same way- 30 minutes to get it into the living room- then take it apart to find the problem- put it back together and back in the Laundry Room- then take it out again the following week to fix it.
If I lived in a house with a garage where I could leave it in pieces until the new part arrived I might feel different but condos are not made for large repair jobs.

You finally get to a point where you want the nightmare to end regardless of what it costs or the hassle.
The Drive Basket was that point.

We chose Speed Queens because:

1) It is a conventional top loader that washes clothes like they did in the past before the government mandated the low water HE machines. This was what she wanted all along we just did not know anyone still made machines like that when we started the Catalyst project.

2) They are commercial machines with a control panel instead of a coin box.
They last almost forever because they are built to last for years in a Laundromat.
20 years of home use probably equates to a few months of what they would get in a commercial environment.

3) They are built the way all washers and dryers used to be built 30 years ago-
Stainless Steel Basket, Porcelain coated steel outer tub, transmission gears and power train parts are all metal with no plastic, and best of all - No Electronics.

3) We bought their top of the line Washer and Dryer locally for less than $1300.00.

4) The machines and all their components are MADE IN AMERICA.

That is why we bought them.

Sorry- so much for being brief.