Maytag Commercial Laundry recently announced that company engineers has just finished a seven-year lab test on the Commercial Laundry MHN33 frontload washers – a test of the DuraCore Drive System that started in 2015 with 10 machines running daily.
Throughout the course of the ongoing lab test, three of the 10 machines were removed from testing and used at trade shows to demonstrate the results achieved, while the remainder of the machines reached more than 60,000 cycles individually.
To put that in context:
- In a multi-family property, one washer/dryer pair can serve eight to 12 families. If a family washes on average 5.2 loads of laundry per week, that washer would need to run continuously between 20 to 30 years until it’d reach 60,000 cycles.
- It’s common for a commercial laundry unit in a laundromat or hotel to run at least five loads a day, 365 days per year. Given that, it would take more than 32 years for that machine to reach 60,000 cycles.
“We wanted to design solutions that translated to reliability at the core of the machine,” said Dan Roscoe, engineer lead for Maytag Commercial Laundry. “We included a durable shaft sleeve that would eliminate shaft wear. We designed the DuraCore Drive System, which offers a watertight, flexible triple-lip seal with garter spring that keeps moisture away from the shaft, protecting the premium bearings.”
Engineer Lead Jason Hudock oversaw the efforts to translate design into production launch, testing, and validation.
“Lab engineers started testing this machine’s DuraCore Drive System in 2015 in multiple lab locations between Monterrey, Mexico, and Michigan to allow engineers easy access to results,” Hudock explained.
Also on the testing team was Kurt Werner, an engineer who has worked for Whirlpool for more than 40 years and boasts more than 25 patents to his name.
“Because the performance and reliability expectations are so high,” Werner noted, “all our single-load washers that come off the production line – 100 percent – get inspected and get that extra human touch.”
