I owned a Kenmore Front-Loader and was not happy with the capacity for my family of eight. I was doing wash forever.

I decided to buy this Maytag MAV 8500 Top-Loader because the capacity was very large, and it had a few whistles and bells that I later discovered were not worth the extra money.

I just wanted to touch on some of the selling highlights of this machine so that you can save your money. Let's start with the fingertip faucet for instance. The fingertip faucet is to be used for pre-treating stains or rinsing the detergent from your fingers. I thought as I was buying this, "What a great feature!". The funny thing is that once I got the machine home and started using it, I discovered that the fingertip faucet will not work once the tub is filled with water no matter at what level, small, medium or large load. You can only use this feature BEFORE you begin filling the tub. I found this feature to be useless. While adding wash and the tub is filling with water, you can rinse the detergent from your fingers then or pre-treat at that time, therefore the fingertip faucet is pointless.

Next is the detergent dispenser that I have had replaced at least 3 times. Imagine having to re-wash your clothes because while opening the lid to get out freshly washed clothes, detergent leaks all over them from the dispenser.
I must say that the last dispenser that was put in lasted for at least two weeks before it started leaking. I stopped filling and using the dispenser.

I can not complain about how clean the machine gets our clothing, but it is very rough on them at the same time. It has taken grease out of my husband's clothing without using a pre-treater, but brand new items come out looking like we have had them forever. And the lint...Oh my...the lint is horrible! Everything, especially dark clothing, is covered in lint so bad that it looks like we all rolled in the dryer's lint trap. O.K. maybe not that bad, but pretty close to it. I did contact Maytag about this and I was told to wash my clothes in a warmer water temperature. I was already using the auto-temp control, one of the few nice features on this machine. It gets the water temperature perfect for dissolving detergent no matter if it is a cold, warm or hot cycle. You get to chose. I wash my color clothes in cold water so that they don't bleed on each other. Let's think about this for a moment...If I wash my color clothes in warmer water, I may get rid of the lint, but all of my clothes will be stained different colors!

The store is exchanging this machine for a completely different machine, since I am very unhappy with it. The repairman has been out to our house so much that he has practically become family.

I'm going to go back to a front-loader, but the Kenmore HE3t this time due to the capacity size being much larger then my previous front-loader. I never had any lint problems, my clothes were very clean and they still looked new after numerous washings in the front-loader.

Since I am getting a little off topic, let me finish by saying, I do not recommend the Maytag Atlantis. Not only are the fingertip faucet and detergent dispenser a waste of money, but you'll be buying new clothes a lot more often due to how rough this machine is on them.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 749.99