Bosch Tumble Dryer Woes (2025 Update)

We haven't needed the manual for our Beko fridge-freezer we've had for 15 years now. And it has a nice twist-style ice tray, taking up minimal room in the freezer.

This is how fixated you have to be, to fix a condensing dryer.

Notice that he still cannot figure out the heat exchanger dust problem - he can clean the obvious bits, but the stop code is still thrown (eventually).

And the sump is as filthy as you would expect, for the job it does. The pump is pumping moldy water. It's possible his pump is still not 100% operational, even though the sump surfaces are clean.

"BOSCH Tumble Dryer Keeps Stopping - How to Fix Ken Suzuki"

When appliances have tubing, and the tubing diameter is that small, the tubing can block with biological material. If the tubing is opaque, you can't see what is going on. And the tubing diameter is critical, the design only works well between a certain min and max diameter. If the tubing had been a copper pipe, the solvation of a bit of copper into the waste water, helps suppress the biological material.

Small pumps like that, are not designed for continuous operation. Some of the bigger fractional horsepower pumps, the motor stays cool enough, to not melt the insulation and you can keep running them. But the small pumps are not really candidates for a long pumping session. This is why the sump has a limited volume, so the pump interval will be short and of a fixed duration.

If the tubing is blocked, some protection on the pump may trip.

I don't know if I would have the room on my basement floor, to do all the rotations of that machine he did (place machine on side, place machine on face with towel to cover glass).

The machine looks about as easy to service, as a Xerox machine that has a "paper dust problem". At least you will become very proficient at removing the screws.

Paul

You have to check the (designed-in) leakage spec on those, before fitting one. Maybe the leakage is 2mA for example, through a couple of the caps. It's an unavoidable AC current flow caused by a couple caps to safety ground.

The two capacitors (diagram) labeled "CT" and "CT" in the center, leak to neutral. And can set off your neutral leakage detector.

This one has its Product Description still intact:

For the well-specified ones, they have an attenuation versus frequency plot. And you have to decide, if the noise spectrum of your device, needs that coverage range or not. My favourite example of one of those, has two poles and goes out to 35MHz, which might be good for computer noises. A regular hot air dryer, the noise spectrum is a lot lower frequency (impulse noise from the dryness detector design, switching of the heater on and off).

Paul

It's the same as the one I bought, but also seems to be out-of-stock! > For the well-specified ones, they have an attenuation versus frequency plot.

This was the original replacement which also failed after a few years, tripping the RCD in the same way:

There are no details of leakage current, unfortunately. The EMI replacement appears to be of better design, with inductive as well as capacitive filtering. Only time will tell if it's more reliable than the OEM one.

Hi Paul

Thanks for the detailed response.

Yes I stumbled across Ken's videos this week. As you say, maintenance friendly these machines are not!

One difference with my failure is that there is no alarm or failure code, the machine shuts down completely. It is necessary to move the dial to off and then back to a program to energise the display again.

Phil

Does any manufacturer make a standalone condenser dryer that works like the dryer part a condensing washer/dryer i.e. is plumbed into the cold water supply and pumps out to a drain?

The one I had (Beko DCU 8230) worked fine - clothes perfectly dry on 'Normal'.

The Iron Dry setting in our washer/dryer produces laundry that can be put away straight from the machine. Heaven knows what the other two settings do.

Well if you do actually want to iron something I guess the "iron dry" might be useful. But does anyone do ironing nowadays?

FWIW, I have a John Lewis washer/condensing-dryer with the same issue as reported. The previous one had no issues. Perhaps the problem is made more likely by now almost never needing to use the tumble dry function.

However, sometimes, if I run a machine clean cycle with one of those proprietary "cleaner" products, it sometimes *will* run a full drying cycle successfully. But not if I run a normal laundry cycle between the "clean" and the "dry".

This to me hints at some kind of sensor issue as a possibility, although I don't know where that sensor might be located, or even if it would be accessible for scrubbing if I did know.

#Paul

From cleaning a random dryer with such a sensor (it did fix the problem): in my case it was one of the vanes in the stainless steel drum, the stainless vane mounted on a plastic base, right in the drum and easily accessible. Hard scrub with white vinegar and it worked again...

Thomas Prufer

Albeit not a washer dryer but I've had good service from the cheapest of Indisit washing machines. It lasted around 13 years and possibly could have lasted a bit longer but the bearings were starting to make a noise. I could have purchased around 6 to 8 Indisit machines for the price of the Miele.

I now have a piece of expensive s**te named Ebac. Made in the UK, but so was British Leyland! So far nothing wrong with the physical build quality but the software is too clever for its own good.

During the rinse and spin cycles it attempts to balance the load before spinning and it can go into a extra 30 minute balancing cycle attempting to do this. It appears that it's one of Ebac unique selling points in that a balanced load extends the life of the machine and allows Ebac to give a 7 year parts (and labour?) guarantee. Unfortunately if the machine cannot balance the load by constantly turning the drum backwards and forwards and winding up a tentative spin by a small amount it will abandon the spin and continue to the next stage or to the end.

This behaviour is somewhat self defeating. If no spin is attempted then no water is removed from the load and a load full of water doesn't balance. For me this can happen for 1 in 8 washes. Set the washing machine to work during the night to come down in the morning to a machine full of wet clothes. The annoying part is if those wet cloths are left in the machine for a few hours water enough water drains out by gravity and a subsequent 'spin only' cycle works.

The behaviour can also add up to 30 minutes per rinse and 30 minutes to the spin cycles on top of the estimated program time displayed at the start of the wash. Even when the machine does a fast spin during a rinse or final spin it may still require an extra 30 to 60 minutes in the balancing cycles. So much for it being ECO friendly with regards energy consumption.

Ebac are very good at removing bad reviews on social media and their own web sites but when I subsequently found some it was mainly the same complaint as above for washing machines.

Ive got this machine, and yes, it does that. Especially if overloaded with a few large items like sheets. Which unbalances it badly. I am glad. It protects itself. Manual load resditribution or removing some of the load and doing two separate spin cycles fixes it

I like the bloody thing.

It's not just large imbalances.

You may like re-arranging the items in the drum after the wash cycle has finished but I'd rather have a machine that works.

Consider if the machine has abandoned the spin prior to the rinse water entering the machine then the cloths are still loaded with detergent and the following rinse is less effective. As this problem happens so often I now use the extra rinse cycle option with the result the machine may spend an extra 90 minutes in it's "I'm trying to balance the load" mode, and it uses more water and more electricity.

You would not be much of a DIY person, if your wash loads weren't perfectly balanced. Everyone has their very own patented "n socks equals m shirts" algo.

This is why my washer runs with the front panel off. Just for observation purposes.

Nobody wants the "you're not very clever" light to come on the machine, and the automatic cycle has stopped. That's like playing pinball, and the ball has gone precisely between the two flippers.

If the machine had a LCD readout, and the display showed the "high score", that would give you an incentive for perfect balance.

Paul

A cheap Indisit coped very well. A machine approx 3x the cost fails.

I had a cheap washing machine,. It shook the concrete blocks off the drum Then it burned out its spin motor.

-- “it should be clear by now to everyone that activist environmentalism (or environmental activism) is becoming a general ideology about humans, about their freedom, about the relationship between the individual and the state, and about the manipulation of people under the guise of a 'noble' idea. It is not an honest pursuit of 'sustainable development,' a matter of elementary environmental protection, or a search for rational mechanisms designed to achieve a healthy environment. Yet things do occur that make you shake your head and remind yourself that you live neither in Joseph Stalin’s Communist era, nor in the Orwellian utopia of 1984.”

Vaclav Klaus

I finally remembered to check, and unfortunately for me there is no visible sensor (or even a thing which might perhaps be one) inside the drum. I might try running it with a double load of the cleaner product, or just up the frequency to see if I can make progess on it.

#Paul

FWIW, a few extra run throughs, one after the other, with the cleaner product seems to have fixed the problem with my JL washer dryer. After a bit of intermittent working, tumble drying now seems reliable. A couple of chunks of solidified detergent/scale also appeared in the filter, so perhaps this was obstructing the sensor, but has now fallen off, helped by the extra cleaning cycles.

#Paul