Some stripping reveals that the drum suspension has gone askew, letting the drum bang on the front and back of the case. This had slowly worn through the rubber door seal (top, so I didn't notice it) and finally the wires to the heater (low centre front of drum) came off and contacted the case, hence the RCD trip.
Repair could be as simple as splicing in four new lengths of cable and some glass fibre sheathing, a new door seal and sorting out the suspension.
Now the suspension? What on earth is supposed to hold this thing in place anyway? There's a tiny fore and aft spring at the top and two tangential vertical dampers at the sides. Nothing I can see (haven't got space to up-end it easily) would stop the drum twisting. Case doesn't come off too easily to look.
It's a Hotpoint Aquarius Ultra 1000rpm model 9539 from 1994.
I can imagine the meeting that came up with that...
"We can't be arsed to earn a good name by making good kit, so let's just=20 pick a name that gullible people will think is good and save all that=20 tedious work stuff."
Add Strachan bedroom furniture to that, and the fact that I had to physically eject their salesman from my home.
Oddly enough my son-in-law (marketing man) who knows all the tricks inside out had the same experience. Despite telling the bloke that he knew all about the "phone call to my supervisor" routine the bloke insisted on doing it. SIL has threatened to punch bloke on the nose if he tried it. In the end he settled for picking him up by the collar and seat of pants and throwing him out of the house.
So has my ~8 year old AEG. One big advantage of such a programme is that it's less damaging to the garment than clumsy lifting/wringing that might happen by hand.
For my next machine (if the AEG becomes terminally injured) I might consider a Miele just because there's a chap down the road who worked on repair for Miele for many years and is now self-employed. Mind, if there's a 10-year warranty, he'll be very out of date on the servicing.
The one I have some experience with is built in the UK, but it was clearly designed whilst under the influence of a class A drug by someone with no experience of anything related to thermodynamics so I can't be sure if it's all the fault of the UK, after all crack houses full of spaced out junkies are everywhere on the planet.
The fault is a solid ice block forming on and below the evaporator such that all internal airflow stops and the freezer stays at -20c or so and the fridge slowly goes to +20c. Despite an array of built in lights and alarms there is bugger all indication that anything is going wrong until it's too late - only independent monitoring by a fridge freezer temperature probe and the now semi permanently fitted thermocouples connected to a spare multimeter show the shit setting in again.
Basically there is repetitive freezing up of the single evaporator (at the back of the freezer compartment), partial melt of the ice formed on the evaporator because the defrost timer isn't working for long enough , followed by a dumping of that ice / meltwater to the space below the evaporator where it never has a chance to run out the hole through the back casing and it forms a solid block. .
The original retailer has gone bust and Hotpoint want 80 quid a time to come and :
a) break plastic parts when you leave it connected to the mains as the ice bonds everything together (despite them saying don't switch it off)
b) rant at the owner that they should have switched it off 48 hours before they came so that a) doesn't happen
c) drink tea
d) reprogram the EEPROM such that it is just like it was before they arrived
e) pronounce that the computer says the problem is fixed
f) piss off and return 2 weeks later to replace plastic bits previously broken in a)
g) tell you that it is now all fixed when it clearly isn't meaning that a few weeks / months later you are ringing them again, except their guarantee on 'repairs ' is just 90 days.
80 quid every 90 days, or 360 quid a year for a fridge that doesn't defrost and doesn't keep the contents somewhere below 20 deg C.
If I had a choice (it's not my fridge freezer) I'd torch it or insert it sideways up the rear passage of the MD of Hotpoint UK. Hotpoint are absolutely f*cking useless. If Dr Drivel and the rejects from The Apprentice ran a company it would be Hotpoint. The big problem is knowing which brands to avoid such that you don't end up accidentally buying ANYTHING produced by the useless bastards.
Maybe it depends on the definition of "a few years" :-)
I think our old Kenmore will make it to at least 40 before the spares supply dries up (by which time we'll probably all have nanobot-infested self-cleaning clothing ;-)
A friend did a lot of graphic art for them, years ago, when Matsui were just invented. He said they used to have meetings where unbranded products were passed around and concensus arrived at on which label to put one them according to perceived quality.
But bear in mind that it may well have a maximum number of hours of operation - when we bought a Miele it was 10 years or 10,000 hours. I suspect we may hit the hours limit before 10 years are out.
Back when VHS video recorders cost a lot of money the company I was working for employed an ex-Hitachi production engineer to work on improving the manufacturing line that we used to make robots. He was astonished that the build cost was about £30,000 per robot. We could sell then for about twice that.
He told me that every single video recorder, which in those days started with a retail price of £250 and went up to over £1000 was costed at £25 to build. It didn't matter how many bells and whistles there were, the build cost was the same give or take a few pence.
Again final price decided on perceptions of quality and "ooh shiny" reaction from the public.
Last year we bought a Hotpoint cooker, made in Poland. The first one had to be returned as defective and there was also internal damage to the oven, which didn't appear to result from shipping, as the outer packing was in perfect condition.
Yes, we know ......... the dirty underpants and the dishtowels go into the same enormous tub in cold water.
Yes, the detergents are formulated differently, but most American housewives rely on liberal quantities of Javex (bleach) and most American washing machines have a built-in bleach dispenser.
They have their good points -- we use one on the caravan site here and it's a domestic model in commercial use -- but new models aren't being made to anything like the manufacturing quality of the older ones. And front loaders are coming in big time on the North-American market.
when it ceases to work, as some day it inevitably will, you're in big trouble because service is horrendously expensive, only Miele servicemen can clear fault codes on some newer models, and you can buy a washing machine of another make for the cost of some of the fairly routine spare parts.
The quality is better than average, but I had a pump fail on one earlier this year -- impeller shaft fractured because it manifestly wasn't up to the job -- far too small a diameter and poor quality steel. I used a pattern replacement for under =A360 -- the Miele part would have been about twice that by the time I got it delivered.
Miele have some dirty tricks up their sleeves, too. Main solenoid- operated inlet valve wasn't opening properly on the one in our holiday cottage. But all three solenoid operated valves are on the one block and can't be replaced individually. A repair by a Miele serviceman would have been well over =A3200 and not worth it on a nine year old machine, so I simply parallelled the connection to the main-wash and pre-wash solenoids and told my wife to use the right hand section of the dispenser tray for the washing powder :-).
I have two Miele washing machines in current use. Yes, I like the machines. But I don't like the company. Nice machines -- but all washing machines are a gamble. With Miele machines the stakes are higher and the manufacturer is of very questionable ethics in terms of the provision of spare parts and service at a fair price.
Is this thing _really_ as badly designed as it now looks to have been?
8-(
"Tub twist" is only prevented by four flimsy plastic protrusions on the front cover of the tub, resting on the inner surface of the front panel. One of these broke off some time ago, allowing the tub to skew and then cause the knock-on effects.
My plan is to glue buffers of white polyethylene packing foam to the tub front, to prevent further skewing. It appears that the axial rotation only dampers are for just that alone and probably not broken (and I can't unscrew them without damage anyway).
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