My thoughts? First - what do you want and need in a washing machine besides a strong assurance of low vibration? Do you need any special cycles? Do you often like to do hot washes? Etc, etc... A machine that may not do the wash cycles you desire, but has low vibration is just a different set of trade-offs from accepting some vibration but doing the wash as you desire. Getting the wash done to your requirements should be the primary requirement and then look for the lowest vibration. You have a second floor laundry room. With this type of setup the big questions for a HE machine are: 1) How quickly can you get hot water to the machine? 2) How hot is the water from your DHW source? Since the Samsung will only use it's internal heater when doing a sanitary cycle, the answers to the above two questions will really determine what the machine can do temperature wise. Our 2nd floor laundry room has a dedicated, insulated PEX hot feed directly from the DHW tank. I checked the other day and the hose fittings felt hot within 10 seconds of the start of flow so it's getting the hot water very quickly. With our DHW set at 131F, a hot fill at the machine was still only about 110F. The SS drum and clothing suck up a lot of energy. In a machine whose internal heater only operates in sanitary, that would be the best we could do for a hot wash. With less optimal piping, it wouldn't even be this good. If we set our DHW source to 140F, I'd guess we could get a ~115F fill. Some people don't care about, or never do hot washes. If that's the case, the Samsung or any machine with no/limited internal heater would work fine. Anyways, just a consideration thats very important to me. FYI - Whirlpool and many LG's (certainly their top of the line) will use their internal heater in a number of cycles (but not all) besides sanitary. Samsung's answer to this would be their silver care stuff. Believing in this vs. actual hotter temperatures is a leap of faith. Also have to consider the environmental and unknown nano health issues of the "Ag" approach.

My washer will do 2 rinses as default, or 3 if you select Water Plus. I've noticed that with some detergents you can get away with using just the 2 rinses and not have any soapy residue, but with the majority of other detergents you have to use 3 rinses otherwise laundry feels soapy and scratchy afterwards. BTW, I've found that using just the water plus function without the extra rinse - i.e. 2 high level rinses (the button can be programmed to add an extra rinse, do high level rinses, or both), that rinsing is improved on towel loads over 2 rinses at the standard level - however 3 is still the optimum. As the saying goes, three is the magic number :-). I have used 4 and 5 rinses before mainly in my older machines (my AEG could allow you to select up to 5, but it wouldn't spin until after the 2nd rinse), but have noticed no marked difference between 4 and 3 rinses no matter the load or detergent, whereas with some loads/detergents you can always notice the difference between 2 and 3 rinses. Some here argue that the standard rinse cycles on their machines rinse perfectly well, which I don't doubt. However in my opinion and through my experience rinse cycles do actually need water, and I've always noticed a considerable difference in performance between low and medium/high level rinses in terms of dog hair & lint removal. As well as the correct water level, another major factor in rinse cycles is how fast and how long the laundry is spun for. My particular machine spins laundry for 4 minutes at 1000rpm after the wash, and 2 minutes at 1000rpm after the rinses and the spins help no end too with the performance of rinsing. These high speed interim spins are important in today's front loaders, which only do a double rinse as standard versus triple or quadruple of yesteryear, and at a lower level. Jon

I got my new HE2t last week. Yesterday for the first time, I actually sat on the floor and watched an entire load wash! Here's my assessment. The machine only vibrates significantly (and not like others have complained about) when it is ramping up to full spin; once it's in full spin, the vibration stops. Even so, not enough vibration to spill any water from a full paper cup I had set on top of the washer. No walking at all, and no vibration transferred to the house at all. What I guess is the pump makes a slight amount of noise a couple of times during the cycle, but nothing like my old TL (also a Whirlpool). Clothes came out very clean using Tide HE liquid. Our machines are not on pedestals, I know that might make a difference. I have a load of hand wash in right now, so I can report back later. In case anyone is wondering, we have been drying most loads on medium high temp on the jeans setting, which starts out at 55 minutes. I haven't paid attention to how long it actually takes, but the clothes are fully dry on that setting.

I had my Whirlpool Duet Steam W/D delivered one month ago today and the dryer does not make any noise. in fact, i had the installation company come back out today and they made sure everything was still level/balanced. i ordered the work surface piece that goes over the tops of the 2 pieces and the machines have to be 1" apart for the top to fit on snugly. the washer had moved a bit. But as for the dyer, i never hear it and it's on the first floor. Sometimes when the washer is in the spin cycle, it sounds like an airplane! Good luck!