Unfortunately we purchased this piece of junk, the Bravos XL to the tune of nearly a thousand dollars, thinking "heavy duty commercial" would bring a decent machine to last mare than a year or so. Should I suppose have gone with a Samsung. within a year or so we got the dreaded "LF". It happens at least once during a minimum of half the washes we do, on all settings....hot cold, "power wash", delicate, bedding, etc. etc. Beside the fact that every was seems to take a half day to finish, and the "LF" error, its been a wonderful experience. After about a year and a half of reshifting loads, trying to put the heavy at the top, then the bottom, without success, I just resigned myself to the fact the machine is and always will be a piece of crap; One day, when I was in the appliance dept at Home Depot, where I purchased it with a ten year extended "warranty", fresh from a bout of fighting the machine, I walked into the appliance department where we purchased it. What followed was what can only be described as a comedy of errors. First of all the saleswoman interrogated me as to why I had waited so long (apparently she has no concept of "we actually have a life outside of the laundry room"), she reluctantly looked up our transaction only to tell us she could find no record of our purchase, of the machine or the supposed "warranty". After informing me that a customer had just been in and told her that this was the best machine he'd ever had, I became adamant that I wanted SOME kind of answer. She didn't understand why it would upset me to find that home depot, which has a computer system to rival the pentagon, would have no record of my purchases less than two years prior. She proceeded to call HD "service", where she got busy signal after busy signal. Until reading the prior discussion, I had been seriously considering going back to HD and buying the biggest sledge hammer they sell and beating this pile of sheet metal into nothingness.... but now that I realize someone has the answer I'll contact HD and exercise my non existent 10 year "warranty" until these incompetents fix it.

Many thanks mrb and sshrivastava for your staying power on this thread! I apologize for the delay in my update: I have, like many others, been suffering from the flu. Well, at this point, let me take back my praise of Miele tech support...I am now actually pretty ticked off with them about the situation. Though I might as well chill out...it is only a washing machine. So my local tech (who is a tech like mentioned on another thread here, contracted by Miele, not actually Miele corporate) came out on Wednesday and shot in the new board. I told him that Miele was sending out a senior tech the next day to take data from the machine and asked that he leave the old board with me since they wanted it back at HQ. He is a very nice fellow and was fine with that. Needless to say, no big surprise, as predicted here, the new board is actually exactly the same as the old board on the delicates cycle...... After my local tech left I called and left a message with Miele to apprise them of the situation and giving them a heads up because my tech implied that perhaps their factory tech could reprogram the machine in the field. I was hoping the senior tech, if he knew ahead, would then be able to change the behavior of the delicates program. Very late in the day I got a voicemail message from the person at Miele who had been handling this, with all kinds of cover your behind language, saying that the service call from the central tech was now cancelled. They had now gone ahead with testing of the machine at Miele and their machine is doing the same thing.....filling on cold and no heater for delicates... DUH!!!!! I was furious. I had expressly told them, after numerous phone calls, waiting on hold, being told it was user error etc., that I did not want to rip my machine open unless it was clear that the program was not acting correctly. They swore up and down it should be heating on that cycle. I guess it is as everyone is saying...Miele tech support is now reading from the manual/script, and treats customers as idiots. The only reason I was talked into going ahead with the board replacement was that they promised this senior tech was coming by and i felt like I had their attention and that would lead to an opening of discussions to get this resolved. So yesterday I called Miele and got the person I had been dealing with. I let him know that I was extremely unhappy, especially with the fact that they pulled the service call from me at the last moment and that I had been telling them for over a month exactly what the machine was doing. Why noone could be bothered to verify it before now is completely ridiculous. I am now told that the issue has been turned over to the engineering dept. I have demanded that a supervisor or someone senior call me because I still do want to follow this up. However, since they are now muttering rubbish about this being "by design"...which is essentially a copout since it is very clear from the manual that the cycle should be capabable of a warm wash at least...I doubt it will go any further. And of course they are only saying this now after a month of swearing up and down that the machine should be giving a warm wash and using the heater.. @sshrivastava: I take your point about Miele COLD. I should clarify, on handwash, wool and delicates, the machine takes in ONLY from the COLD valve. Therefore, the COLD fill for those cycles is not 86 deg but whatever temp your incoming cold water supply is. Right now it is around 10C in Buffalo so my washing is ridiculously cold. On this point, pretty much if Miele wants to fix this cycle they would have to allow the machine to fill on a MIX of hot and cold, if ever to achieve 40C. The delicates cycle uses a LOT of water, which is its great appeal, and there is no other cycle like it on the machine. The 110V heater would definitely not be able to get that much water up to 40C in the wash time allotted for the cycle. My suspicion is that the delicates cycle on Miele has always been designed to fill only from the cold water valve, but with the old 220V heaters it was not a problem. I suspect that something was changed in the programming when Miele went to the 110V machines in the US. In any case, I told them right out it was not by DESIGN, but clearly a MISTAKE. So now I think I need to chill out about this. I have absolutely no intention of releasing my spare control board so at least I have that in reserve if I ever need it. I the mean while I think I have found that the dress shirts program could be used in lieu of delicates. The wash action is not quite so gently and the water level not as good. However it does use the heater. Therefore, as the machine fllls I can dump in a few extra pitchers of warm water manually down the hatch and let the heater take it from there....it is better than nothing. Doing this with the actual delicates cycle itself is useless I have found because the heater doest not engage at all. Therefore even dumping hot water straight from my faucet (over 55C water) down the hatch results in a pretty cold wash after you take into account heat loss due to the mass of the drum and the wash time. So I think the bottom line is that there are at least two useless cycles on this machine: Normal (no heater) and Delicates (cold only). I also think wool is pretty much useless in that WARM is not achieved by the heater in the cycle time and that cycle does not allow the extended option. @MRB: Thanks for your info about the gentle cycle. Here is what my service manual says: 2.2.2 Gentle Cycle Setting for gentle cycle. Selecting the gentle cycle reduces the drum movement. Fabrics are washed gently. For lightly soiled laundry. It does not say anything about which cycle it affects. So far as I can tell it is not affecting my delicates cycle. However, I am leaving it engaged because all the cycles look aggressive enough to me, even with it enabled. I would not be surprised if it is not actually doing anything....

I also have the KitchenAid Ensemble, and have washed my son's very bulky Queen-sized Euro-style Ikea comforter in it 4 times in the last 4 weeks, and it comes out clean and smelling great. (He's 12 - and don't tell him I told you, but he still wets his bed about once a week). This particular comforter is so bulky, it just barely fits into the Ensemble washer - I mean, I'm pushing it. The first time I washed the comforter, I used the Sanitary cycle, but now I just use whitest whites cycle, and it works just fine. I've also washed loads and loads of towels, jeans, etc., using Normal or Heavy Duty, depending upon soil level and everything comes out so clean. I'm starting to sound like an advertisement - but my whites really do come out white! I never thought that was possible before. I was a little bummed when I realized that the Ensemble didn't have the "bulky" setting, but have found that it's not necessary. Oh - today I used the "silk" setting for my dark red table runners, and placemats, and they came out great! "Silk" doesn't have a spin cycle, so I added the spin cycle after the silk cycle completed. The runners and placemats had not been washed since Christmas day, but our electricity was out for 2 days, until this afternoon, so wash had to wait. Still, they all came out clean. Have I mentioned how much I love my KA Ensembles? I used to dread doing the laundry, and now I actually like doing it.

Always owned top-loaders with a standard agitator. I use the 'perma-press' setting (regular wash speed/gentle spin) on all but towels, using fast spin for them. My machine also has gentle wash/gentle spin as an option. Clothes are clean/fresh/not tattered. I lightly dry, then hang most clothes to finish. We are just two adults, but did the same with three kids. I did use a front loader for six months in temporary living until a new home was built... HATED IT! Yes, I am yelling. Wrinkles galore, NOISE, huge vibrations even on a tiled/concrete floor, maintenance (leaving door open, smell, gunk on the gasket, undissolved detergent in dispenser) and length of time to complete a load. But, I say to each his own. If you have one and love it, good deal! We are all different in our needs and choices. However, I do have a question regarding the 'high-efficiency' aspect. Unless someone lives on well water that is slow to recover, or lives in a water challenged area, what is the justification for most users to save water, yet use the extra electricity that 1-1/2 hours to complete a load of wash requires??? I do not condone waste of resources, but this seems like an either/or situation. Comments?