Maytag Neptune MCG8000AW Gas Dryer

I am just crushed. I have wanted this dryer since its debut. Waited to see if there were bugs. Read every review. Interviewed repair techs regarding its performance record. (All of them said they'd sold very few, often just one or two.) Saved up my pennies and finally bought the gas model.

The dryer below is a dream. Huge. Lots of controls to tweak the drying. Honestly, I rarely dried anything in a conventional dryer knowing that heat sets stains and that lint is just your clothes slowly being eroded. I prefer to air dry clothing and baby our clothes so that they look great for as long as possible, but with a family of 7 that's a labor-intensive process that leaves laundry drying everywhere. My interest in this dryer was the ability to dry things sans tumbling but faster than air drying and neater. Surprisingly, I find that I am using the lower dryer more than I anticipated for "finishing" clothes.....getting them neat and wrinkle free with no stray dog hairs. I am comfortable doing this in part because I can dry at very low temperatures with this dryer. I would have liked the interior door to be metal.

My only minor complaints with the lower dryer are that the plastic door liner seems like a cheap alternative to the metal I would have preferred and the static from it makes lint/hair stick to the door instead of always going to the lint filter. Lint filter is so fine it can be harder to clean.

The upper cabinet was the real draw for me and it has been a crushing disappointment. I spent hours and hours on the phone today with repair techs (Sears) only to discover that we knew more than they did. (Finally confirmed by an apologetic supervisor and a schematic inside the body of the machine.) The cabinet was dripping....everywhere. On my floor, into the lower dryer, down the sides of the unit. It didn't seem to be venting. We double- and triple-checked our ducting which was entirely per the preferred specs. Maytag information was both of no help and snotty. "You have a moisture problem", said they. "Yes, but why?", queried I. "That is our complete diagnosis and informational assistance", said they. Arrrrrgggghhhh. We were looking for troubleshooting help and we got attitude instead.

At the end of a very long day full of phone calls to repair techs we confirmed our suspicions when we took the front panel off the dryer. The upper cabinet does not vent anywhere but into the room inefficiently---through cracks in doors, not a vent per se. It also is heated with a 110V heater, the least efficient means possible of drying clothes. Who would imagine that a gas dryer would dry clothes electrically (in the upper cabinet only)? Who would imagine a dryer wouldn't vent externally? (Upper cabinet only.) Maddening and disappointing and Maytag seems determined to bury these pithy nuggets of information.

My washer is a state-of-the-art front loader with high spin speeds. My clothes enter the drying experience as dry as any would be washed in any machine. What I suspect my biggest "problem" is, is that we wear almost exclusively 100% cotton clothing and even at high spin speeds cotton retains moisture far more than synthetics.

My dryer is only 3 weeks old and Sears has a 90 day return policy. It will be going back with tears in my eyes. It's a mousetrap which needs to go back to the drawing board.

It COULD be a great dryer. It could have a fan that even vents into the room air to improve it. Maytag could be forthcoming about the fact that half of this so-called gas dryer dries electrically and at the least possible level of efficiency. And, by the way, even the electric dryers which use 220 volts below uses only 110 above. This is not only an expensive dryer to purchase; it's a very expensive dryer to run. It's a crying shame. In this reviewer's opinion it didn't need to be this way.

Somebody please pass me a Kleenex. I am heartbroken.