Which type do you recommend? The two combos I had bought generally didn't work: they could only dry a very very limited load (less than a half). A standalone dryer turned out much more effective.
> Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. … We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design. We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. … They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.”
As a professional laundry engineer, I second this notion. If I'd buy Miele for our 24/7 80ton/month laundry plant, - I'd expect it (with tech on site) to start breaking up on start of 3rd year. With every other brand they start by start of 2nd year. The problem with them isn't the price (5x the usual) but how they lock up every little replacement part and force you to pay for service for everything.
I have one, and it’s an excellent machine (15 years old, no sign of wearing out), but the dryer is fairly lacklustre. It can only dry about half a full washing load, but I suspect that’s just physics: however much a machine can dry, it can wash more.
We air-dry everything anyway, so it’s not a problem for us, but I wouldn’t want one somewhere that relied on machine-drying a lot.
we generally have more space in the US than Europe/Asia so we don't need it and having them split means you can do more loads of laundry at once if you're the type to do all your laundry in one day.
Also early ones were much more failure prone and harder to work on (though manufacturers have pretty much abandoned that metric for consumer machines these days anyways unless you're spending lots extra for it).