I agree with sr712. At the very least make sure you don't get caught.

Seriously though, I definitely agree with your commetns about Top Loaders. What you want is lots of water, lots of clothes rollover, and lots of mechanical action. Given this, I suggest looking at the Whirlpool / Kenmore direct drive agitator washers. They have a faster agitation stroke than most other top loaders, and they are definitely deep fill machines.

My Cabrio seems to do well with pet hair.

Yes, I've heard that Cabrios do well with pet hair despite the fact that they are low water HE machines. It just goes to show that there's more involved.

My theory is that the water in the Cabrio is circulated from inside the wash tub to underneath the wash tub with the pumping action of the impeller. Pet hair collects there, and gets trapped by the self cleaning lint filter. (the same is true of agitator washers as well) This is different from front loaders.

Front loaders don't have anything like an agitator or impeller to force the circulation of water. Instead, in a front loader water circulates due to gravity when the clothes are lifted and dropped by the tumblers inside the wash tub. Normally one would think that this would work as well, but in a front loader the clothes drop back onto the inner wash tub surface so there is no space for pet hair to seperate from the clothes.

In the Cabrio, and in agitator washers as well, clothes are lifted up so there is a space under them that can fill with free water, and it's this free water that allows pet hair to float away from the clothes and be sucked away.

The LG circulates water from the nozzle above the door down onto the clothes, in addition to tumbling.

Find a GE FilterFlo. They were sold until the late 1980s or early 1990s so are not hard to come by on the used market.

::removing kitty from the washer:: Ok darling, apparently we aren't supposed to do this....heh heh

My cats thank you all for your comments! And I do as well since they reinforce my theory on top loaders. We'll check out the items noted and see what we can find locally! Thanks...and MEOOOOOOWWWWW (from my hairless kitties)

Since lint traps are no longer on the TL machine I put my cat hair items in the DRYER on air, before washing them, for as long as cat hair is caught in the dryer lint filter. After washing in my TL there is not much hair for the dryer lint filter to catch. This works very well for me.

hailefinn,
why do you feel the need to remove the pet hair before you wash the items? I think it is pretty unsanitary to throw dirty clothes in the dryer and using a no-heat cycle. All the germs from your clothes and the pet hair will be all over your dryer then. IMO it makes more sense to wash the items and then let the dryer remove the excess pet hair during the dry cycle that you'll use anyway and then wipe down the drum of your washer if necessary. That way you'll be dealing with relatively clean pet hair. In my experience the pet hair mainly stays on the clothes if the wsaher doesn't rinse well enough. The dryer will catch most of it.

My grandmother has cats and her Maytag Bravos washer does very well with removing pet hair. She cleans items that have extra pet hair on them in the sheets cycle. This cycle uses the most water and because of that she gets good results in terms of pet hair removal.

I would also imagine machines like the GE Harmony and Fisher and Paykel Aquasmart might do well with pet hair, in terms of HE TL's. But I'm not speaking from experience in terms of those machines for I don't own them. Just my 2 cents. :o)

looser---and to think I had a great idea with the dryer removing the cat hair before washing until you brought up the idea of "germs". Thanks for pointing that out.

The millennials need to pull their head out of their butts and design a WASHING machine that washes clothes, plain and simple! It's been done before!!! If nothing else go back to the old technology, IT WORKED! The new crap CLEARLY doesn't work. Stop trying to shove it down our throats and blame it on the end user. ITS A BLATANT DESIGN FLAW. FIX IT.

Millennials don't directly have much to do with it ... your government increases the water- and energy-usage restrictions every few years and manufacturers/engineers largely must keep designs within those constraints.