I've had many good years with Maytag washers and dryers and Kitchen Aid dishwashers and refrigerator. Our first refrigerator was a Frigidaire but that is back when they were a part of General Motors and made good appliances. Now it is just a name by a company that has bought and sold many of the appliance names like Hotpoint, Crosley, Emerson, White, Westinghouse, Gibson and more.
Whirlpool now owns Maytag, Amana, Kitchen Aid.
Kenmore used to have a lot of Whirlpool, but they also bought from Roper, LG, Frigidaire and probably others. We were supplying parts for the Frigidaire room air conditioners and there was a specific Sears version with a tiny useless variation that was there just to be different.
My next refrigerator will be an LG because it is the only company that makes what we want in a 33" wide version. we can't fit a 35" in the spot needed. Current fridge is 22 years old but still working.
BTW, check the warranty on refrigerators. Many now only give 1 year for the sealed system, a few still have 5 or 10 though.
For many years, Whirlpool has been my favorite brand of appliances. Simple, and straight forward. And the repair parts are less expensive than GE, for example. The GE ones with the circuit board are a continuing issue, the boards go bad.
LG is also a bit too complicated for my desires.
I lost a lot of respect for Sears when I find they use off spec parts. For example, a lawn mower with Sears Tecumseh engine won't use Tecumseh points, flywheel, or air cleaner.
Personally, I think it depends on how much you already know and whether you are fairly experienced at buying real estate. It also makes a difference, in my opinion, whether you are buying a property "retail" -- meaning looking at listings for ordinary ready-to-move-in properties primarily as a retail buyer -- or if you are an investor type and you are looking to buy an investment property that may need work etc.
This may seem a little counter-intuitive, but I think of the typical retail purchase of a home as one where it may make more sense to invest in a home inspection, especially if you do not know a lot about building construction, plumbing, electric, water issues, roofing issues, etc. The home inspector typically costs around $500 to $700 in our area (East Coast, New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania area). But, they usually find enough in the way of issues about the property that it will pay (or almost pay) for the cost of the inspection in the form of seller concessions or seller fixes before the closing takes place.
Depending on where you live, one way to find a good home inspector is to look for real estate investor clubs in your area and check out their websites. Most have a list of "business affiliates" or "vendor members" that belong to the club who represent various trades. The members often ask each other for recommendations for home inspectors, structural engineers, mold inspectors and abatement companies, etc. You may not want to join a local real estate investor group unless you plan on investing in real estate, but you may be able to get good recommendations of who to use in your area for particular types of home inspections, or to look at possible structural issues or inspect a septic system, etc.
Here is a link for finding real estate investor clubs in your area:
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Or, if you post the area where you may be buying a home, maybe someone here will know of a good real estate investor club in your area or a really qualified home inspector.
As part of one of the two real estate investor groups that I belong to, I have heard several home inspectors, structural engineers, mold remediation companies, etc. give presentations to our group and I have a good idea of who I would use or recommend if needed.
The ones I've seen are pretty much jokes. They can find obvious problems but, more often than not, home problems are not. Sometimes they won't even see the obvious things. I think they get tunnel vision and start focusing in on problems they have encountered in the past.
Get one, but take it with a grain of salt. Plus, see if you can find a HI with good credentials.
While it's true that an agent's immediate interest is in turning houses, a smart agent will also look to future business. People who buy houses also sell them, often several times over. Make a customer happy once and you will likely have them for a long time. If the agent leaves the agency or starts their own, happy customers tend to follow. The alternative is the unknown, not something people want when making such life-altering changes.
That's because of government interference and fear of lawsuits. They can't afford to be sued for even appearance the wrong information or "discrimination". However, if you listen to what an agent is saying (or not saying) the message is often there.
Electrolux (not to be confused with the vacuum cleaner people) tries to use that name for the premium line as opposed to the value Frigidaire line. They bought the old WCI group from Husqevarna. When it was still owned by White Consolidated Industries, the marketing department did a survey of all the brand names they owned and people associated Frigidaire as the best of the bunch. GM sold the appliance division in
1979 to White Sewing Machine Company. Then it was White Westinghouse.
In the past, Kenmore washers and dryers were typically made by Whirlpool, but my understanding is that over the past dozen years or so, that's increasingly not true.
In Canada, Whirlpool appliances are sold under the name "Inglis". Similarily, Amana washers and dryers are sold in Canada under the name "Speed Queen".
Companies prefer to operate in other countries under a different corporate label so that if the Canadian subsidiary gets sued, it's officially a different entity than it's US parent company, and so the US parent is unaffected by that law suit.
The reason why so many coin operated laundry mats use Maytag top loading washers is because Maytag's top loading washer design is significantly better that that of the competition. (see PS below) Their dryers aren't any better than anyone else's. And, with a Maytag top loading washer, you can service the machine almost entirely from the front and top.
Ranges, fridges, and clothes dryers are all mature technologies and everyone basically uses the same technology. There are several companies the the USA that made fridge and freezer compressors, but Tecumseh and Embraco are the largest. So, if GE, Frigidaire and Maytag all use Tecumseh compressors, how can one say that GE fridges are any built any better or likely to last any longer than anyone else's.
PS: Maytag top loading washers have a stupid part called an "air injector" that from what I can see does absolutely nothing. It introduces bubbles of air into the water stream that's headed for the wash basket, and Maytag claims that the resulting turbulence helps to get the laundry soap dissolved in the water. But, that's BS because less than a second after those air bubbles flow into the wash tub, they rise to the surface of the water and break. It's the stupidest thing; a well designed washer with a part on it that does nothing that needs doing, and is just a potential water leakage site.
I bought a John Deere riding mower. Thought it should be a good mower. After 300 hours it would not pull up a hill. Found out later there is a company that makes transaxles for many mowers. They have some very good ones, and also some that are not very good.
That's true, but looking at the property tax bills that were sent out since 1990 will tell you who owned the house before the current owner, and who owned it before that. That's because in each case, the property tax bill you're looking at each year will be exactly what was sent out in that year; showing the current resident/owner of that address.
This is in fact how I screen prospective tenants. If a tenant gives their current address as a house and gives their landlord as Mr. Joseph Blow, and I look at the property tax bill and find that it's still being sent to Joe Blow at that same address, then I know that I can't trust any reference I get on that tenant from Joe. While it's possible the tenant rents a basement apartment from Joe, there are just too many instances where people know that they're not going to get a good reference from their real landlord, so they just ask anyone who owns a house to pretent to be their landlord for the purpose of giving them a glowing reference. If the person paying the property tax on that house lives at a different address, then there's a much higher liklihood that the relationship between them is strictly that of landlord and tenant. The property tax bill will always be sent to the landlord or property management company, never the occupant of the property such as a tenant, because they could very well just throw the tax bill in the garbage to cause problems for the landlord or management agency.
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