The dry times are so much faster with my he washer! The washer will spin at 1600 and a load of towels will dry in 20 minutes! With my old Maytag TL it would take over an hour to dry a load of towels!

I brought up this topic back in 2005 give or take when I had gotten my Duet pair. My Duet spins on max at 1000 RPM. One of the selling points is that drying time was reduced. Quite frankly, I never noticed any reduction in drying time.......

Some loads (depending on fabric) can take 25 to 30 mins. But medium to large loads like mixed & jeans or whites along with white towels can take 40 to 50 minutes on high heat. And my vent run is clean. An overly large heavy load can take as long as an hour, but I don't usually do too big of loads like that very often.

I couldn't imagine putting a large load of thick laundry in my dryer and it be bone dry in 20 to 30 minutes. Perhaps the higher spin RPM's than mine do make a difference, but mine seems to spin really fast and rarely gets out of balance.

Mark, I haven't seen any discrepancy with jeans, which is totally amazing to me. Towels do take a bit longer (usually from 30-40 minutes), but I do wash full loads to capacity, so I consider that great.

One of the main reasons I replaced my w/d a few years ago was because towels were taking up to 2 hours to dry (!), which was not only a waste of time, but also a huge waste of electricity.

Sandy, so glad you've had the same experience. What a blessing. :)

mara, a gas dryer is cheaper to run than an electrically-heated dryer. I made the switch more than 20 years ago and am glad a did. that dryer was still going strong late last year but I wanted a shiny new pair of Samsung W/D so I sent it and a working TL Maytag to appliance heaven. :)

I should add that my definition of dry is not bone dry. Expectation could alter dry time too.

Sandy - good point!

I hate drying things absolutely bone dry too. There's a certain dryness level I like. You can feel a little moisture in the clothes but not so much that you're afraid to fold them and put them in the cupboard/drawer etc without fear of them not drying the rest of the way. So folks who want things bone dry will have a somewhat longer drying time. Those times I posted for mine are not bone dry - but a little less than that.

I do know for a FACT that these HE Front Load washers can handle much more than the dryer can as far as load size (at least in my experience.) I can tell a huge difference in viewing the tumbling action in the dryer if I had a decent sized load in the washer; when it's in the dryer, it doesn't tumble as well and looks overloaded to me (even though it wasn't overloaded in the washer) and my dryer is 7 cu ft. If I have a normal load in the washer that isn't overly large, it seems like it gets cupboard dry in 35 to 40 min's. I should probably break the loads up when I feel they are too large for the dryer but I don't. I just don't let them get bone dry to minimize wrinkling.

Evan 30 years ago most dryers had sensor bars that detected the electrical conductivty of the clothes and delayed going into the timer setting until they reached a preset conductivity. Then the adjustable part of the automatic cycle was a timer that you could set to achieve the desired dryness. My old (1993) Whirpool must be set to about one mark dryer than the mid position to get most of the clothes dry. Ultra thick denems or padded stuff will still be damp on multiple layers becaus the sensor responds to where the first of the load is dry enough. I just take out the stuff that's dry and put the rest back for a 15 or 20 minute heated timer dry tumble. I have a Samsung 337 which is energy star rated and spins much faster than the old top loaders.

Electronic sensors 30 years ago were largely only on top-of-the-line models. Mid-line units had thermostatic auto-dry, and low-end models had only timed drying.

You're not quite understanding how the electronic sensor works. On machines with a mechanical timer, the timer motor stalls (only) when damp clothes brush across the bar to complete the low-voltage sensing circuit. The timer always runs (or can), it's just stalled more often than not at the beginning of the drying cycle when the items are very wet/damp, so it runs for only very brief moments which makes it seem to not be running at all.