mrblandings:"can you explain what the advantage of tiling over mud ". Well, the advantage is ,Mud lasts forever ,I am remodeling old houses "30,40 50 years old" the tiles are so strong on MUD ,unbelivable,( so ,using MUD is a money saver,that's my opinion),Ditra,BackerBoards ? you gotta change it in a few years or so,you don't want that.You were talking about saving money.So do it right the first time and you won't have to redo it again.Slope it, go ahead,nothing wrong with that .

WOW - that isn't a primer, that is an encyclopedia. My stacked FL set sits in the middle of my kitchen in an open laundry closet on a wooden floor over a crawl space. I have no movement, only a tiny vibration as it ramps up to full spin speed and little noise. I can stand directly in front of it and talk easily on the phone. I can't imagine needing or wanting to go through all of these steps to fix noise and vibration problems but the information is certainly interesting.

I have a 2nd floor laundry "closet" -- just the washer & dryer, both full size, in a closet with folding doors. When I remodeled, I had a floor drain installed in the floor, and had ceramic tile laid onto the floor, along with tile wainscoting. I wanted to ensure there would be no leaks from this closet. Everything works well, no rattling/shaking going on, and it's been in place for nearly 5 years. I'm delighted with the results. The tile closet opens onto hardwood floors. Both the hardwood floors and the tiled floors are laid on top of sub-flooring that's made of particle board, if I remember correctly.

SQ Home "soft mount" front loaders should never be confused with SQ hard mount commercial laundry equipment. They are two completely different equipment types with different mounting requirements. The new SQ home soft-mount has twin liquid balance rings with balancing weights moving around in those liquid rings. When the weights move around in the rings, they counteract some of the out of balance load that may be in your clothes load before those forces then pass through the shock absorbers, and ultimately to your floor. The result is the energy that would normally be produced as a load into the floor is internally offset, resulting in lower loads applied to the floor and overall smoother vibration. Remember, a soft-mount washer has shock absorbers, that when properly tuned, absorb about 85-90% of the load that would normally otherwise be transferred into the floor. So, to illustrate what ends up hitting your floor, let's assume that the SQ soft-mount FLW had 20 lbs of clothes in it, had a 20% off-balance, ran at 400G, and that the shocks could counter 90% of the vibration. And with no knowledge of what the SQ liquid rings can counteract, let's guess half of the off balance, or 10% and that machine capacity. Doing the math, 20 lb x 0.10 x 400 G = 800 lb before shocks; 80 lbs after shocks would actually hit your floor. Since the machine probably weighs 250 lbs, the oscillating load into the floor is not enough to lift the feet to move around in your laundry room. A SQ hard mount on the other hand has no internal suspension and therefore any produced out of balance loads are directed through a heavy gauge frame into the concrete floor it is bolted to. How big are these forces? Let's say you had a 20 lb model with that same 20% off balance load in the wash. The SQ hard mount units are rated to spin out to 200G extract force, the math (20 lb x 0.2 x 200 G) would say 800 lbs would be directed into the floor. Big difference between the two loads into the floor, and the SQ home soft mount spins out with twice the G force on top of that. Remember, the above examples are hypothetical to illustrate the differences between a hard mount and soft mount suspensions and the forces into the floor. The new SQ front load, with the combination of twin liquid balance rings and shock absorbers should give a good experience for the homeowner. These show up in laundromats and apartment buildings with high usage, way more cycles per day than a homeowner would ever put on one. Laundryvet