Introduction

If your attempts to chop tomatoes with a heavy butcher knife while drinking red wine alongside your fiery, spitting pot of spaghetti frequently go awry, the Whirlpool Duet WFW96HEA may be of interest to you, ya silly face. This machine's most basic cycles performed quite well on stain removal, so even if you lose a finger, cuss, and then spill your Merlot, at least your shirt will survive your buffoonery -- that is unless it's made of fine, Turkish angora, in which case it may be pummeled to death in the wash, depending on the cycle (you really shouldn't be cooking in Turkish angora). No, no, put that fragile top in the Delicate cycle, which handles clothes with truly tender care.

With a rather pocket-emptying MSRP of $1,449.00 (sale price about $1,200), this model fails to altogether satisfy, and the annual cost of running it is higher than we like to see too, at $34.91. The WFW96HEA is an above average worker with some notable high-end goodies though, such as its Precision Dispense drawer. With this drawer, users pour enough detergent in for about 36 loads, which the washer then measures and dispenses automatically during each wash. This is both convenient and cost effective. We should mention too the Fan Dry option, a feature that tumbles clothes periodically for up to 12 hours as an integrated fan circulates air throughout, reducing humidity so that your damp socks don't smell like death.