babim, personally I wouldn't go with all Miele despite the phenomenal 10 year warranty they are currently offering. There are some Miele appliances that are worth it such as dishwasher, speed oven and laundry pair; the hood fan, oven, and radiant cooktop you can get elsewhere. If you said induction, I would have said Miele. You didn't mention a fridge? If you are committed to Miele and having a consistent look (and using the warranty as a back stop to make sure that the appliances work in the long run), have you gone to a Miele Design Gallery and played with the appliances? I went to the one in Vancouver and the representative let me cook on the steam oven and speed oven, which was immensely helpful. Everybody's feedback is different so you might actually like a Miele oven (personally I liked it and it's large cavity). As to the speed oven, even getting the chef version with the knob is at least Canadian $2900 before tax and delivery. If you just re-heat items, then get a Panasonic microwave as it will do the job and they make a ton of versions. And get a Breville counter top toaster oven. Both of these cost a fraction of the speed oven. The best thing about the Miele radiant cooktop that I saw was that it was designed specifically to mount a Miele oven underneath without having it positioned too low. Usually most people have cabinets underneath a cooktop due to the space clearance. My brother has a Miele cooktop - it works, it looks nice, but nothing special for the price. You can get a great hood with Kobe (I think better than Miele but perhaps not as nice looking). If you are in Toronto, you can get it from Tasco or other dealers. Tasco also has a website that lets you filter the appliances that they distribute (tascoappliance.ca). Other hoods you can look at are Best and Zephyr. A good resource is ajmadison.com where you can filter appliances and read reviews. Have you given it a try?

There is a huge amount of free e-book material available on the WWW. File types range from epub to zip and everything between. I use the features available in CALIBRE to convert to an epub file (Nook Color), download the metadata and select the best cover, view the book and then if all ok download it to my Nook. Calibre can add books to my Nook or delete books from it. I usually have only 4 books on the Nook and the rest stored on my PC or on DVD's; about 8 gigabytes of books, i.e. thousands of books. For me CALIBRE is an essential program.

When a load gets seriously unbalanced I do hear something like a knocking noise during the spin cycle. It doesn't happen that often, but when it does I usually pause the washer and try to untangle a few of the offending items. (The legs of long pants can get tangled up during the wash cycle and make proper balancing impossible.) How do you load your washer? It is recommended to loosely throw in one (or a few) item(s) at a time instead of shoving in a whole bunch at once (my SIL did that a few times and it did cause an imbalance problem). If the washer itself doesn't move or shake it probably isn't a vibration problem. Hope this helps!

Peter- Thanks for the link to the Intelliflo technical discussion. Obviously this was an Intelliflo only discussion and only addressed low speed efficiency. Variable speed pumps with BPM motors will always use less power than a PSC motor at low speed. There is no argument here. However, variable speed at higher speeds suffers from large power consumption due to two primary power robbers 1) high current inversion of AC to DC power in the VFD, which is very inefficient and produces a lot of waste heat as a result 2) Compromised impeller design because the impeller can not operate at peak efficiency for a large gpm range so the engineers have to make a choice where they want to optimize the impeller and at the same time a choice at where the impeller will not be very efficient. In the case of Intelliflo, from their published power, TDH and gpm curves, they have optimized for low speed operation and rightly so, but this choice also causes the higher speed efficiency to be miserable. Also of note, while I agree with your warning of using FLA to estimate power consumption, I would also add that the Intelliflo curve is true power consumption in watts and not FLA. Using FLA to calculate 2 speed pump power is worst case and, to your point, will only be better in the real world which makes the 2 speed even more favorable over variable speed. Just wanted to offer a balanced view here. Variable speed has its own merits, mainly low speed efficiency and ability to tune flow to plumbing resistance for optimum performance. But, to suggest using a variable speed pump for multi-tasking, which requires higher speeds, is not doing the energy conscious homeowner any good. In the case of pools with multiple water features or in-floor cleaners which require higher flows, multiple 1 speed or 2 speed pumps that are tuned for the higher flows will always save energy over a variable speed that is trying to inefficiently cover a large operating range. jj- In your case with a floor cleaning system...the floor cleaner will have to run for about 2 hours a day to get full rotation of the heads and full cleaning. For other hours of the day, the pump can ran at low speed allowing the pump to operate easier against lower resistance providing turnover and filtering for your pool. A variable speed or a 2 speed will both provide energy efficient operation for your cleaning and filtering needs. Only you can make the decision if you want to spend the extra money for the variable speed. To help you justify the extra cost for variable speed over 2 speed, use 200 watts per hour savings over 2 speed at low speed and 1,000 watts per hour cost over 2 speed at high speed. Knowing how long you will run the pump at high and low speed will allow you to calculate how much money is saved per day with variable speed and 2 speed, helping to make your decision. Hope this helps!