Anyone? Bueller?

At first glance the floor drain idea sounds like a pretty good idea, but when you think about it, the only thing seperating the inside of your lovely home from a filthy sewer, is the U-bend water trap in the floor drain. No problem if you flush it regularly, but if you let it dry up you're going to be waking up to the lovely smell of sewer gas. However, this would work if it can be connected to another drain, and then have both drains flow into a U-bend trap. That way the other drain would presumably keep the U-bend closed off. I'm not a plumber though, so please treat this as speculation, not a suggestion. As far as putting the washer in a tub is concerned, I tend to agree with your sales person. The risk is that it will lower the friction between the washer and the floor, and your washer will start walking all over the place. It's true that a washer on a pedestal is going to weigh 250 lbs plus, but the problem is resonance between the washer and the floor, not that the washer isn't weighing enough, because these resonances are specifically caused by the washer being so heavy. So, if you have a vibration problem with the washer, it's specifically because the 250 lb weight of the washer is interacting with your flexible floor. Weedmeister's suggestion regarding manual single handle water valves actually has quite a bit of merit, because if you think about it, you realize that you're dealing with probabilities here. Let's say for aurguments sake that the odds of you having a broken water hose is 100,000:1, and the chance that you would forget to turn the hose off is 100:1, you can calculate the chances of you having a flood as 10,000,000:1, and you've effectively turned the remote possibility of a flood from a broken hose into something that's impossible for all practical purposes. The trick lies in being able to train everyone who uses the washer to turn the valve handle to the off position after every wash load.

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

Bubble-level doesn't have much relation to vibration. Reduction of vibration is primarily related to all four corners of the machine equally supporting the weight. However, a substandard floor structure can't be compensated by that. Whether the machine is absolutely 100% bubble-level and the weight equal on all four corners, any oscillation of the drum during spin will transmit into the floor.