We bought our Hotpoint machine new seven years ago; it was a special purchase (like sale only they don't tell you the original price) from John Lewis, cost a few hundred quid, not sure what it would normally have cost.
It is still working pretty much as normal; however, now and again, usually when I do a 30 degree wash for some reason, it rips a few small but vicious holes in one or two items. I'd say this has only happened a bout five times over the years but still, it's annoying because it renders the garment pretty much unsaveable; they aren't the kind of holes you can sew.
Also, it has no "half load" button, so you can't run small loads to save energy. This really annoys me.
Finally: it is very very slow. Every load seems to take absolutely for-bloody-ever compared to machines I've used before. Like, two hours or something. There is a "quick wash" but it's so quick that I'm not convinced it cleans very well, so only use it occasionally.
We can't really afford a new machine, strictly speaking, as I have just used a chunk of my redundancy pay to purchase a tumble drier for the first time ever (I anticipate it will be life-changing as we live in a small flat and do a lot of laundry). However, as itDC2 is due in a few months I'm just wondering if now, at sale time, it is worth biting the bullet and upgrading the machine to deal more effectively with the even bigger laundry volumes that another baby will bring. I suspect, too, that energy use might drop a lot and offset the cost if we had a new model.
What do you reckon? I'm totally on the fence so not "hoping" for any particular answer.