Not, perhaps, something to get excited about, but a necessary household appliance, nonetheless. As a household which contains two fairly scruffy adults, who work from home, our laundry requirements are comparatively light, but our 11 (we think) year old LG machine was starting to be a bit problematical. The finish was wearing off, and the door sensor was clearly dying; mind you, it had been clearly dying since before we moved here in Nov 2009, so probably the machine’s demise was not absolutely imminent.

Anyway, time for a replacement. We ended up with a Hotpoint WMUD942X (who thinks up these model numbers?) from Argos, selected because it has a high energy rating, and a snazzy stainless steel finish, which nicely matches our grey kitchen with stainless steel dishwasher and ovens.

Argos offered an “end to end” service – deliver, install, remove old one, with an offer of 6 months’ Ariel liquid gel, so all in all the price looked good. As it happens, just after we’d ordered it, a friend said his machine had died, so we gave him the old one; he didn’t seem to mind the manky finish, and the dodgy door sensor, and much better that than landfill.

First off, the delivery service: almost wonderful. A phone call within a couple of days of the order giving us a delivery day, a text the afternoon before giving us a four hour slot, and finally a text saying “within the next hour”. The chap was polite and efficient, but it transpired that he could not install the machine because we have an extension to the drain hose. If they’d only told me, we could have got the necessary part (which cost the princely sum of £1.25 from the local hardware shop), but he unpacked the thing, removed all the transit bolts, and took the packaging away, and all done in a cheerful and courteous manner. He also brought no Ariel liquid gel, and professed no knowledge of such an offer.

Pete cycled off for the missing piece, and then manhandled the machine into its new home and plumbed it in. We read the manual (!), and set the recommended autoclean wash going. It has amber lights! It’s quiet! It’s shiny! It’s cold fill only, which surprised us a bit, but apparently they’re pretty much all like that now, and it takes about 1hr 10m longer for our normal wash than the other one, but I understand that’s because modern machines use a lot less water. It has a 24 hour timer, and we always put our washing to come on at night, ready to hang out in the morning, so that’s fine.

We’ve done a couple more loads since, and the machine has behaved very well, and we’re pleased with it.

As for the free Ariel liquid gel? You might well ask. It’s still on the web site, so I phoned the number on my e-mail receipt and nobody knew anything about it. they then put me through to Hotpoint who didn’t know anything either, but put me on hold while they went off to check. Eventually, they returned and told me to “fill in the form on the Argos site and send it off” but I couldn’t find one, and even prodding Argos on Twitter brought no result. I found a generic claim form for Hotpoint via Google, so have filled that in. We shall see.

I’m very pleased with the machine – it seems a good choice and, as they say, ticks all our boxes. Just a couple of little gremlins in actually getting it here, but nothing at all insurmountable.