A tip we rediscovered a few years ago(it's well over a century old) is that adding a bit of borax to the washer not only helps get your laundry cleaner, but it will make all your laundry smell better, too, since borax/boron is an extremely powerful agent for killing bacteria, molds, and fungus. My wife is sold, and almost refuses to do the wash w/o borax anymore!

(This might even help deal with the continually scummy front-loader problem, but I can't speak to that as we prefer our 33-year-old Kenmore top loaders that can still actually be repaired rather than replaced with expensive new Chinese/Korean crap every few years. Mechanical timer controls and durable design and mfg FTW! For what it's worth, our total cost of purchase and repairs over 33 years is maybe $1200.00 for the washer/dryer set.)