Washing Machine woes

[Mike Dodd]

A couple of weeks ago I helped my sister plumb a washing machine into a new house. Today I get a phone call from her complaining that its not heating the water (i.e. 90 degree wash = stone cold). Now, when I plumbed it in there was only a single cold flexible pipe attached, which is what she claims was attached in her previous house. I understand that most machines will take a single cold feed and heat the water internally, or can "mix" a cold and hot feed to assist this process.

In this case, however, with a single cold feed and a resulting code wash, what's the likely cause of the problem?, the things I'm thinking are thermostat (or, as with all machines, having a variable wash temperature, is this likely to be a thermistor and a board of gubbins?), heating element, thermal overload fuse?

For what it's worth - machine is a Zanussi, and I'm waiting for her to get back to me with a model number.

If the above assumptions are correct, are these easily repairable / replaceable items?

Any info gratefully received.

Mike

[Lee]

Not what you asked, but is the machine completing its cycle when asked to do a 90C wash? I only ask because we had a Zanussi that would stop on a 90C wash if there was no water going into the "hot" valve. Bridging the hot and cold with a "y" adapter and just feeding it cold water fixed it...

We currently have a Whirlpool which does exactly the same, seems a bit stupid really.

Lee

[BigWallop]

Try connecting the fill hose to the other inlet of the machine. A hot wash cycle normally only takes hot from the supply side to the machine. Using hot to fill machine means the heater isn't on as long as will be using only cold water. The machine only has a small heating element and will take ages to heat for a 90 degree wash cycle.

[Karen Greenall]

Check the "energy saving" features of the machine, there may be a setting that doesn't heat the water internally, because it assumes the water coming in will already be warm. On my whirlpool AWM328 there's a button that does exactly that, marked, logically enough, "Energy Save"!

[Harry Bloomfield]

TheChief was thinking very hard :

Remove the drain pipe from where it drain into and tip it into a bowl on the floor. It may take several bowl fulls to empty it completely.

Water is only retained in the machine, because drain pipe rises up higher than the highest water level the machine ever achieves. To drain it in normal operation, needs to use a pump in the bottom.

Once it is drained, you can usually take to top panel off and gain access to the door latch to manually release the door.

Tripping an RCD, is usually due to carbon from the worn motor brushes shorting the motor internals to ground. Worth cleaning out and fitting new brushes, usually.