trouble getting clothes clean in your h.e. washing machine?

Here's my story

TRIGGER WARNING: if you have the attention span of a gnat, this thread is not for you. not sorry

*clothes are stained and smell bad. hours of troubleshooting with samsung online, on the phone and two different service calls on the machine*

We finally made a breakthrough.

We already had a technician examine the machine and reported no defect found. A second technician from the same company reported the same but, advised that we get a second opinion from a different company.

That person actually made an insightful observation. He was having the same trouble at home with his whirlpool h.e. washer; clothes weren’t getting cleaned. He observed that the amount of clothes that seems reasonable actually isn’t. Since the water level of the cycles is really, really low (hence, h.e.), the clothes at the “top” of the load are not getting water or agitation.

I responded that I had read to use the bedding cycle to increase the amount of water in order to address that problem. He noted that doing so makes clothes float to the top of the drum, away from the wash plate which agitates. So, that doesn’t solve the problem either. The bedding cycle has more water because the bedding absorbs more yet is heavy enough to stay anchored to the wash plate for agitation.

His solution was to reduce the amount of clothes he was using and to increase the “soil level” setting so that there was greater agitation. When I say reduce, I mean to the water level. That is probably going to be much, much less than what most people are used to. Our “normal” cycle setting only fills the drum with 2-3 inches of water. That is a tiny amount of clothes.

The result – it worked. I had to wash smelly shirts 3 times but, they eventually started to smell fresh as in, the smell of the aroma enhancer/detergent products we use in the wash. They had been getting so bad over the last year that I was about to start throwing clothes away.

This brings up the point that the h.e. aspect of the washer is a misnomer. Yes, it uses less water but, without a traditional vertical agitator, the amount of clothes that can be effectively washed is so low that we’re going to end up running the washer for 3 times the number of cycles we did on previous washers which means we’re going to use the same amount of water anyway. It’s a ripoff. And no we’re not saving the planet given the colossal amounts of pollution being generated by asia, Africa and india.

All of our socks are stained so bad, I can’t get the stains out, even with a spray pre treatment and bleach. I don’t really need the bottom of my socks to be pristine so I’ll let Samsung off the hook for that.

The moral of the story is, I wish the documentation had been clear in regards to the amount of clothes that can be effectively cleaned by any cycle. Here is the statement from the manual: "Fill the tub with dry, unfolded clothes." As it is, Samsung spent a few hundred dollars in out of warranty service fees and hours of phone troubleshooting.

I hope that helps someone dealing with the same problem