The washer repair technicians buy for themselves
In 2018, a small washer company in Wisconsin did what the federal rules asked and made its top-loader efficient. F9 Its own customers turned against it. F9 A year later the company brought the old machine back, and to make it legal it built a wash cycle that its own staff called the Department of Energy cycle. F10
That company is Speed Queen, and it builds every home washer it sells in a town of under eight thousand people. F2 F1
We are going to open one up and show you what is inside, who has owned the factory and why that almost killed it, and why a washer that comes with five years of free repair visits is so hard to find on a big store floor.
If you walked into a big-box store this week, you probably believe the most reliable washer in America is standing somewhere on that floor, with a sale tag on the lid. That is an illusion. The company that makes it decided a long time ago that it did not want to be sold that way.
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Ripon, Wisconsin, and the commercial laundry
Picture it. It is 1908, in Ripon, Wisconsin. F1 Two men who run a hardware store, Joe Barlow and John Seelig, start selling hand-powered washing machines they buy from a maker in Kansas City. F1 They think the gears are too slow, so they rework them, and then they buy the rights to build the machine themselves. F1 The first ones go out under the name White Cloud. F1
In 1911 they build their first washer with an electric motor. F1 And in 1928, the name that will outlive both of them goes on the machine: Speed Queen. F1
Then the company does what successful family companies do: it gets bought. McGraw Electric takes it in 1956. F3 In 1979 the appliance division, Ripon plant included, is sold to Raytheon, a defense contractor that builds missiles and radar. F3 For almost twenty years, Speed Queen belongs to a company that has nothing to do with laundry.
But here is what matters for your laundry room. Speed Queen was never only a home brand. It was building the machines in laundromats, apartment basements, hotels and army barracks, machines that run all day, every day. A home washer built on that side of the business is built by people who expect it to be abused.
The crack: the home market stopped wanting it
Here's the crack, and it has two halves. The first is money. In 1998, a group led by Bain Capital bought Raytheon's laundry business for about three hundred and fifty-eight million dollars and gave it a new name: Alliance Laundry Systems. F4 In 2005 the private equity arm of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan bought control for about four hundred and fifty million. F5 In 2015 another fund, BDT Capital Partners, bought a majority stake, at a price nobody announced. F5
Three private equity owners in seventeen years. F4 F5 This is usually the part of our stories where the factory moves to Mexico and the metal turns into plastic. Remember that. We are going to check whether it happened.
The second half is the law. Federal efficiency standards kept tightening, and every maker had to use less water and less energy. In 2018 Speed Queen answered with a new top-loader, the TR series, where the tub and a fixed agitator twist together to save water. F9 It was efficient on paper. F9 Owners said it did not clean like the old one, reviews turned, and sales dropped. F9
So in 2019 the company brought back the classic design, with a real agitator that moves on its own, and called it the TC5. F9 The trick was in the rules. The Department of Energy judges a washer almost entirely on its Normal cycle, and does not measure the other settings at all. F10 So Speed Queen built a very light Normal cycle to pass the test, labeled it Normal Eco, and kept the heavy cycles the way they used to be. F10 Its vice president of home sales told Wirecutter that people inside the company jokingly called it the Department of Energy cycle. F10
Wirecutter tested it, and the Normal Eco cycle barely touched their stain strips. F10 Speed Queen even tells its dealers to steer customers to other cycles. F10 Keep that in mind. It is the first thing you will change the day you own one.
What is actually inside a Speed Queen
Now, the part almost nobody knows. We promised to open one up. Take the cabinet off a TC5 and the first thing you notice is what is not there. The transmission, the part that turns the agitator and spins the basket, is all metal. F11
The TC5 comes with a five-year warranty on parts and in-home labor, on the whole machine. F11 The TR7 carries seven years. F11 The company says it tests its washers to ten thousand four hundred cycles, which it counts as twenty-five years in an average home at about eight loads a week. F12 That is the company's number, not an independent one, so hold it loosely. But notice what a company has to believe about its own machine to pay a technician to come to your house for five years.
So what did the three private equity owners do to it? They did something rare: they spent money in Ripon. In 2016 a sixty-two point six million dollar expansion of the plant was approved. F8 In 2017 a two hundred and twenty-five thousand square foot addition opened with about two hundred new jobs. F8 Today the plant covers about a million square feet on fifty-eight acres, with roughly a thousand people working there. F8
Here is the map. Speed Queen belongs to Alliance Laundry, which also owns UniMac, Huebsch, IPSO and Primus, and sells commercial laundry machines in more than a hundred countries. F7 In 2025 it took in about one point seven one billion dollars. F7 And in October 2025, after twenty-seven years of private equity, it went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ALH, at twenty-two dollars a share. F6
That is why the metal stayed metal. The money in this company comes from laundromats and hotels, where a washer that breaks costs the owner every hour it sits there. Speed Queen says it designs and makes all the critical parts of its machines in Ripon, the same plant that builds for those customers. F12
If you want the ownership map for every appliance brand, not just Speed Queen, it is on the site. One page. No email required.
Why almost no store will sell you one
So why is it so hard to find? Speed Queen says it sells mainly through independent dealers, many of them family businesses, because a dealer can show you the metal parts and install the machine properly. F14 You can find a TR7 on Best Buy's website, F14 but the company's plan is the local store down the road that sells the machine and then comes out to service it.
And there is the price. A TC5 costs about fifteen hundred dollars. F13 A typical Maytag top-loader at Home Depot is about seven hundred and fifty. F18 On a big store floor, next to a machine at half the price with a touchscreen and a bigger drum, a plain washer with a dial looks like a bad deal. Big stores sell what moves off the floor. Speed Queen sells to people who already know what they want.
Now, the title. The people who fix washers for a living rarely go on the record by name, and we could not find one who did. What we found is better than a quote: the service data. Yale Appliance, a dealer in Boston that fixes what it sells, publishes its repair numbers every year. F15 Out of thirty-three thousand one hundred and ninety first-year service calls Yale tracked across brands, its top-loading Speed Queens needed a repair four point six percent of the time. F15 Two brands in that report did a little better, and one did much worse. F15 So in year one, Speed Queen is good, not magic. The difference comes later: Speed Queen pays for the repairman until year five, F11 and Maytag stops paying for labor after the first year. F17
But here is the other side, and you should hear it before you buy. Consumer Reports tested the TR7 and gave it thirty-one out of a hundred for washing performance, the worst score of the more than one hundred full-size washers it has tested, top-loaders and front-loaders alike. F16 In the same review, it notes that Speed Queen is the only agitator brand whose owners are actually happy with it. F16 So it is not the washer that gets clothes the cleanest. Its owners like it because it keeps running.
Which Speed Queen model, and for whom
So do you buy one? Three answers, and the reason for each.
One. Do not buy a Speed Queen if what you want is the cleanest wash per gallon. F16 Consumer Reports found washers that cost hundreds of dollars less and clean better, and if that is your measure, buy one of those and accept that you will replace it sooner. F16
Two. If you want the machine the old Maytag used to be, buy the TC5. About fifteen hundred dollars, an all-metal transmission, five years of parts and labor. F13 F11 And skip the Normal Eco cycle: use Heavy Duty or Permanent Press, the way the company tells its own dealers. F10
Three. Before you pay, call a repair shop near you and ask if they work on Speed Queen. F15 The company does not run its own repair fleet, so the dealer and the local technician are part of what you are buying. F15 A five-year warranty is only worth something if someone will drive to your house.
Now put the warranties side by side. Parts and labor on the whole machine: seven years on the TR7, five on the TC5. F11 A Maytag top-loader gives you one year of parts and labor, then parts only on the motor and the basket. F17 The warranty is the one place a company has to put a number on how long it thinks its machine will last.
The full Lifetime List for washers, with every source in this video, is linked below. Buying through those links supports the channel and costs you nothing.
What you are paying for, and what you are not
Somewhere in America right now, a young couple is standing in front of a wall of washers, comparing drum sizes and screens. [EX] The machine their grandparents would have bought is not on that wall. It is two towns over, in a small store with the owner's name on the sign, next to a washer that costs twice as much and says less about itself. [EX]
Now you know. Check the transmission, check the warranty, and ask who is going to fix it before you ask how big it is.
If you own a Speed Queen, tell us in the comments: the model, the year, and how many loads you think it has done. This archive gets written by the people who used the machines, not by the people who sold them.
Different aisle, same question: the four tool brands still worth buying, and the map of who owns the rest. That is our next story. Subscribe so you do not miss it, and I will see you there.