The salesperson LIES to you about Miele. I have NEVER in over 5000 hours of use, had a dryer cycle run for three hours. Most cycles are between 45 and 90 minutes with the vast majority around 60 minutes. You need a washer with a good spin cycle to remove as much water as possible first. If you put sopping wet clothes in ANY dryer it is going to take a long time to dry.

Whirlpool ventless should be avoided due to their needed disassembly for periodic cleaning. That is a non-starter for most people. Miele's dryers (And Bosch) have a sealed system that only requires cleaning the filters from time to time. Miele has the edge for faster dry times and a better lint filtering design.

In CR's testing, the Miele outperformed the Whirlpool in every dimension. Of course, the Miele is much smaller and costs more. The statement, "Whirlpool ventless should be avoided due to their needed disassembly for periodic cleaning" is obviously an opinion of the writer. The owner's manual states that lint should be removed from the dryer cabinet every two years and should be done by a "qualified appliance servicer". But the Miele requires cleaning of two filters plus vacuuming of its heat exchanger unit.

Cleaning Miele filters is as easy as cleaning my old Whirlpool lint catcher. And passing the vacuum wand over the heat exchanger vent on occasion is no big deal. You make it sound like major maintenance. It is not.

@Hochwertiger Trockner:"You make it sound like major maintenance. It is not."

I didn't say it was major maintenance.

I didn’t say you did. I said it sounded like it to me. If I misunderstood I apologize.

@wdccruise

cleaning the lint filters in a Miele is a world of difference vs disassembling the machine to clean it. They are not even comparable procedures. Miele is routine for ANY dryer. Whirlpool typically requires a technican. I don’t know what they were thinking.

@luna123456: "I don’t know what they were thinking."

They were thinking that removing accumulated lint from inside the dryer cabinet is not a task that owners can or should perform. Routine lint cleaning is performed by the owner. For more information, read the use and care manual.

My comment was meant to convey that this was a poor design. Not an analysis of why a tech would be required.

Any system that has an enclosed heat exchanger should NOT need routine cleaning. Not only does it reduce system efficiency, but it also increases compressor run time which accumulates additional wear. It’s a poor system design, which is why i stated ”what were they thinking?”

Thanks, all. Luna23456, based on your experience, do you think a family of four would regret the Miele, because of its size?

Oops. I meant luna123456 - sorry, Luna!

We have 14 people living in our home and it works for us. Now I have to say we have TWO of the W1 washers.

It all depends on how you like to do laundry. If you are ok with doing a load every day or every other day there should be zero problems. If you like to save laundry for a single day and you have a lot of it, then it will be a long day.

We do laundry every day and it works great because the load sizes are just right when sorted into whites, colors, etc. Every family is a little different. I, personally, like doing laundry. I like using a machine with lots of options, etc. It makes laundry less of a boring job. That is ME.

Only you can decide.

Luna123456 Fourteen! We’ll I guess I can manage four… I appreciate hearing about your experience. When I ask friends about this, they all try to figure out ways I could vent a full-size dryer. Not what I want. I think.

Luna123456 - we are kindred spirits. I too like doing laundry (and any house work, chores, when I can dial in the right options for a satisfying outcome). And I love having equipment/tools that work well and last. Thank you for making the the Miele W1/T1 learning curve enjoyable.

Such a useful thread. I'm in a Manhattan coop where venting is not an option. I get nervous about the small capacity of the Miele and long for the size of the Whirlpool, but the Whirlpool ratings are pretty terrible. I have owned a Miele vacuum cleaner for 16 years and it has never needed repair of any kind. Best purchase I have ever made. Perhaps I'll fall in love with a Miele washer and ventless dryer too?

Great discussion!

We have a full size whirlpool ventless 27 inch stacked washer/dryer. It needs at least 1hr 30 min for a full load to fry. But it is 8 years old and having issues of noise and sometimes does not balance or overheat and won’t start. We have only used it for two years. We do laundry daily and it is a work horse. By capacity (7.4 cubic ft) it is much larger than the miele (4.0 cubic ft). We love miele dish washer and vacuum etc. Is the miele ventless washer dryer as powerful as the whirlpool ventless? Miele is smaller but is it as powerful in cleaning/disinfect capability (high heat dry, disinfect)? These are crucial feature in the pandemic as we work in the hospital. Any advice?

You don't want to rely on a dryer to 'fry" your clothes for disinfection. One of the big selling points of heat pump dryers is that they do NOT get super hot and cook your clothes. Sanitizing is best done in the washer using heat and a form of bleach. Oxygen bleach works very well at higher temps. For cooler temps chlorine bleach works better.

That said I have nevrr used chlorine bleach, only oxygen bleach. The Miele W1 will heat to 75C in the sanitize cycle. MOST textiles are NOT designed for those temps on a routine basis. The exceptions would be 100% cotton towels and TRUE linen items. Meaning the item must be 100% linen as in flax. No "linen" items that are really poly synthetic.

If you work in healthcare in setting where your clothes could come into contact with a truely serious transmissible disease then your scrubs should NOT leave the facility. They should either be washed using on-prem laundry with appropriate chemicals and heat OR sent out to off premises laundry.. (I do NOT count Covid in this list as for healthy people is NOT a serious disease).

If you are not medical staff and are administrative, etc. and the risk of picking up or transmitting something to a patient is low, then washing at home on the hottest setting the clothes can tolerate with oxygen bleach will work great. The MIele W1 has an oboard heater. If you choose the allergy option for the cycle (assuming that cycle supports it) then the water temp will be held for a minimum of 12 minutes and more water/extra rinse will be used for a better rinse.

In our house almost everything gets washed at 60C (140F). Colors, whites, etc. The only items we do NOT wash at 60C are woolens, Cashmere, Denim and some delicate synthetics. We mostly buy 100% cotton or poly/cotton clothes. The main issue is making sure you sort by color, do not put any reds in with anything that is white or off-white. Once items have been washed a couple of times the risk of bleeding is very low. We mix all dark colors together, all light/pastel together, whites separate and reds/pinks separate.

This is where proper sorting and the MIele compact really shines. We have four stacked laundry baskets that house members toss dirty clothes into. They are labeled with the above colors. There is also an OTHER basket for the exceptions I listed above. Once a basket is full it all goes in an gets washed. We do more towels than anything and all of those get washed together. We limit the colors so there are just whites and pastels. All whites get washed together and all pastels. We usually do 7-10 bath towels a day (one load in the Miele W1). We have NEVER had funk on them. Oxygen bleach starts getting pretty active at 140F and up. It destroys most bacterial and viral organisms by oxidizing or denaturing their cell wall or protective covering. If you have every spilled peroxide on your fingers and the very upper layer of skin turns all white, that is what is happening. The peroxide is destroying the cell walls on the very outer layer of your skin (which as you know is mostly dead cells anyway). Add heat to the peroxide and the effect is much stronger.

So the proper answer is that it is best to disinfect in the washer when using a heat pump dryer. The dryer will almost never get above 140F and most of the time is lower than that. That is a GOOD thing for the life of your clothes.

Thank you very much for your helpful response Luna123456. I really appreciate you sharing all your insight and your experience with laundry. Being in a house of 14- you are a Professor on this and I appreciate you teaching me and learned a lot (thanks You and the others on this chat! I also love good tools/instruments as well).

My thoughts:

1. completely agree that my scrubs never leave the hospital. But Hospital don’t do socks or underwear etc.

2. agree bleach is helpful. But high temperature or “autoclaving” is how Hospital laundry disinfect. So I’m asking how high can the miele dryer go up to in temperature?

3. I see everyone here shared a little about yourselves and you are wondering what I do. I am a surgeon working in intensive care unit. COVID is a Serious disease for the healthy. I see healthy people die of COVID so please do be aware. Even if you are “healthy” you can have generic dispositions or undiagnosed illnesses that can make you sicker with COVID.

We do not have to be fearful of COVID, but COVID isn’t just a cold. Even a “mild” covid illness can cause permanent brain injury. You kindly shared your expertise. I want to share mine to thank you in return. It is false to say COVID is not serious in healthy individuals. It is also a matter of kindness and compassion as even if one falsely assume it only affect older people, everyone will get old if one is lucky. And COVID affects everyone through the ages. The more exposure to COVID the more damage - it is cumulative like radiation or smoking… So do be careful.

4. can the Miele T1/W1 do a king size comforter? I know it can do many towels. But it’s the large whole piece I am wondering?

5. is there a dramatic difference in temperature for the little giant vs T1/W1? I see one of you kindly addressed this. Can you be more specific? Is the steam function high heat and does little giant have this?

6. I’m not concerned about high hear injuring my cloth. We get 100 percent cotton whenever possible as it’s breathable. But we can’t put bleach in all loads.

7. Are the Miele quiet? And will it get very hot outside as our laundry room is in a tiny alcove?

Thanks again to your helpful response.

"But high temperature or “autoclaving” is how Hospital laundry disinfect"

Miele do make autoclaves to treat medical instruments. These machines are essentially pressure cookers, as you know. A residential dryer is not that.

As for sanitization, Miele Europe make these claims:

Hygienically clean – scientifically proven

With Miele, your laundry is more than just cleaned – it is hygienically cleaned: more than 99.99 % of E. coli and S. aureus bacteria are reliably removed in the “Minimum iron 40 °C” programme with the AllergoWash extra option and in the “Cottons hygiene 60 °C” programme (if available in your model). As confirmed by Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences.[3]

3 . Tested and confirmed by the Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences. Applies to all models in the Minimum iron 40 °C programme with the AllergoWash extra and – if available for the model – in the Cottons hygiene 60 °C programme. A description of the relevant methodology can be found at the following link: http://www.miele.com/media/ex/com/Testkriterien_Hygiene-Siegel.pdf

Subject to technical changes; no liability accepted for the accuracy of the information given. See General Terms and Conditions in footer for additional details.

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Elsewhere on the website, Miele say that the Cottons Hygiene 60°C cycle with PowerWash technology, TwinDos and the AllergoWash option, will remove over 99.9% of viruses including the coronavirus.

Said Hygiene with AllergoWash cycle lasts about three hours. I don't think it's an available cycle in the US. Sanitize would probably do the same, as it gets even hotter.

Now for the dryers, this is what Miele Europe say.

Effective against bacteria

Hygienic laundry care – also during drying. HygieneDry can be relied upon to remove 99.99 %[7] of all bacteria from your laundry during drying. This is achieved thanks to especially long temperature holding times. The effectiveness of HygieneDry has been confirmed by the Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences. HygieneDry is suitable for fabrics with two dots on the wash-care label.

7 . Tested for Bacillus subtilis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae bacteria in the HygieneDry drying level with half load. A description of the relevant methodology can be found at the following link: https://www.miele.com/media/ex/com/Testkriterien_Hygiene-Siegel_T1.pdf

Subject to technical changes; no liability accepted for the accuracy of the information given. See General Terms and Conditions in footer for additional details.

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For the HygieneDry dryness level, the use manual states:

The programme completes the normal drying process for laundry care first. The finish time counts down to 0 minutes. Then the temperature holding time starts. At the start of the temperature holding time, the remaining programme running time is extended by 85 minutes to produce a hygienic drying result.

Unlike with washers, there is no mention of coronavirus anywhere. I don't know if HygieneDry has made it to the US yet... but I assume one could run a timed cycle after the clothes are dry. I don't know how hot Miele heat-pump dryers get. My Bosch surpasses 158°C as it overdries clothes on its Anti-Allergy cycle, with 140 to 149°C being the normal temp at the end of a normal cycle. Edit: I just checked the manual for the European Little Giant models: the custom cycle programming mode allows a temp of up to 167°C to be set.

My bathroom is about 65 ft² and even with the door shut (not recommended) it never got above 79°F with my Bosch dryer doing full loads.

The Miele dryers are pretty quiet. In some of the videos on YouTube, you can hear the clicking of the moisture-sensing arm that rides on top of the drum like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MqxKEKI8gTg

Spund levels are somewhat dependant on the room. Bare, hard surfaces will reflect more and anything in the room will sound louder. Miele appliances have brushless motors so they dont sound like a jet engine when spinning, but they are not fully silent.

Our older Bosch AXXIS wash was probabaly twice as loud on spin. During wash you will hear the water sloshing around more than the machine.

I tried to find a noise rating for the large ventless Whirlpool dryer. On website I found (digital trends) measured it at 65 decibels, which is about the same a the Miele units (62 to 66 decibels, depending on the model).

Keep in mind that a rating in decibels is NOT linear. An increase in just 3 decibels would be a doubling of the pressure and 10 decibels would be the perception that the sound was twice as loud.

Wow. So thankful to whirlpool_trainee for the specifics and for answering my quests. I learned so much from your post. And thanks for the great links too!!!

I Really like your analogy of pressure cooker. The bugs they quoted are common bacteria in our GI track (mouth and colon). There are so much worse bugs than COVID - multi-drug resistance bacteria etc. Those need to be “cooked” like when we go camping and need boil water.

I can’t find the temp dryer miele T1 go up to in US? And duration of high temp it can sustain?

I see you mention Bosch- that’s the other alternative. Do you like it better?

Thanks again and apologies for the delay response as it got so busy at work

Thanks Luna for the helpful comments.

Yes wdccruise. From my perspective of seeing so many previously “healthy” get so sick, it’s not surprising. That’s why I was compelled to answer Luna123456 comment “I do NOT count COVID in the list as for healthy people is NOT a serious disease”.

I have little to contribute this link and got a lot a great advice here. I sincere want to pay it forward and want you all to stay healthy. Inspired by whirlpool_trainee, I send this National Geographic article with link below. It is very good in summarizing the new data on how mild COVID can affect brain - decrease brain size, causing brain fog etc from very reputable universities and journals (Oxford etc).

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-and-technology/2022/04/even-mild-covid-19-can-cause-your-brain-to-shrink

Issue is, unlike other parts of our body, our brain cells do not regrow after we are born. Any thing that cost us something will make our brain less healthy. I compare this to no longer having income and continue to spend - no matter how little you spend, the longer you live, the less you will have. We don’t have to fear Covid as there are some treatments, but taking simple precautions at home to avoid getting infected and Re-infected are key.

Stay safe. Thanks to all again!

great thread! husband us an er doc so, well well, it makes the conversation more interesting. im wondering if the miele washer/dryer can handle a poofy queen down comforter, two poofy down pillows? heavy long bathroom rug? we are only 2 so the rate limiting factor is potentially bulky items.

So we have a whirlpool ventless dryer has anyone figured out how to clean the lint from inside the hybrid care filter? I have been scraping with a paperclip and trying to vacuum up the bits through the screen but it's soo tedious and annoing.

Agree Sonia. it’s very tedious. I wash the sponge under water and the use paper towel to dry it. But it’s how making a high pitched noise. I am done with the whirlpool and will move on to either miele or Bosch as the experts here recommend.

Anyone can tell me the difference between miele and Bosch ventless?