Kenmore 44052

Overview
The Kenmore 44052 is a front-loading, consumer electric washing machine with electronic controls. The controls are located on the front, just above the loading door, to allow stacking of another unit (such as a dryer) on top. (For practical purposes, the top unit will also need to have controls on the front in order for it to be usable when stacked; Sears makes at least one model of dryer designed to be stacked on top of the 44052.)

Reference

 * product page at Sears
 * rating/reviews at epinions.com

Disadvantages

 * The electronic controls do not give you any indication of where you are in the wash cycle, e.g. how long to the next spin, how long until finished, whether you've made it to the spin cycle etc. (although there is a light to tell you you're in the final spin).
 * There appears to be a delay of approximately two minutes between when you manually interrupt the cycle and when the door unlocks. Disconnecting the unit's electrical power either resets the timer or does not affect it.
 * Spin cycle not as effective as other front-load models (this may be due to a defective unit)
 * The balance sensor appears to be very sensitive to heavy objects (such as stuffed animals) in the load, and will refuse to go into high spin.
 * The final spin in the special "drain-and-spin" cycle is extremely finicky; in one instance, the washer refused to go into a spin in the drain-and-spin on a load of laundry which had just succeeded in going through a fast spin as part of a full wash cycle and then again as part of a rinse-and-spin.
 * According to a Sears service technician, the use of non-HE-compliant laundry soaps automatically voids the unit's warranty, although some service technicians will overlook this if sudsing does not appear to be an issue. (I was unable to find mention of this in the text of the user manual or the warranty, hwoever; the most mention of "HE" in either of those locations was an admonition to "look for this symbol on the detergent label" in the instructions for adding detergent, and a suggestion to "use a low-sudsing, high efficiency detergent" – note the lowercase spelling – in the instructions for dealing with oversudsing.)

See also the reviews at epinions

Reviews

 * 2006-03-01 Hypertwins vs. the Kenmore 44052