You may find it useful to ask about your problem on the forum below. It is run mostly by service engineers and members of the repair trade.
"Washing Machine Help Forum"
The centripetal force on the water is proportional to the angular velocity squared, so a higher spin speed has a significantly higher drying effect. (Drum radius is also a factor when comparing machines, but not as significant as spin speed.)
There are two effects from increasing the force on the water with a higher spin speed.
The most obvious one is that it will cause the water to be ejected faster, so you'll get more out in a given time or you can spin for less time to get the same out.
The second one is a surface tension one. After a certain length of time spinning, you will have got out everything that is free, which is all the water droplets in the fabric which are large enough that their weight under centripetal force is enough to overcome their surface tension keeping them in capillary form between fibres of the fabric. If you raise the spin speed from, say 1400rpm to 1600rpm (14%), the weight of the remaining water under centripetal force increases by 30%, and this results in a significant amount of the residual moisture which remains at 1400rpm being ejected at 1600rpm, depending on the nature of the fabric, but certainly cotton. Fabric softener used in the final rinse (rather than combined with the main wash detergent) has a similar effect by reducing surface tension and improving effectiveness of the drying cycle (but it also makes things like towels less absorbent for drying you afterwards).
Towels spun at 1600 come out dry enough to be used to dry you (although they won't feel completely dry).
High spin speed is certainly much more efficient than compensating for a lower spin speed by using a heated tumble drier, and I suspect that would apply to a heat pump tumble drier too although I've not looked at their specs.
Yes, high spin speeds can cause more wear, but machines include checks for balanced load, and will typically have several goes at trying to balance a load before giving up and using a lower spin speed. OTOH, the higher spin speeds are usually above the natural resonant frequencies of the components in the machines, and that causes less wear in other places.
I find a damp towel is better at drying me, than a very dry towel.
The EU has certainly not considered the effect of their efficiency measures on the life of the clothes.
Back in the 1980's, one of the many design aims of washing machines was to get the maximum life out of clothes. Programs were carefully designed to lift the clothes out and drop them back in to the wash water gently, to prevent them rubbing and stretching. Drum wash speed and fill level were tuned to do this optimally. Wool washes would use a higher fill level and less agitation so the clothes were not lifted out of the water at all, and the water helped support their weight to avoid damage.
Then came all the eco stuff. You could no longer use as much water and you couldn't use the energy required to heat that much either. This forced a switch in washing method whereby clothes are washed by being dampened in detergent and agitated by being rubbed together, the complete opposite of what's required to prevent wear, but wear in the machines wasn't considered a factor. So although machines are now more efficient, you have to buy more clothes, and things like growing cotton plants use vast quantities of water and energy.
It also results in the release of loads more micro fibres in the waste water, a problem now so bad they've had to mandate the fitting of microfibre filters and interlocks to prevent machine use if the filters are not being effective.
It can be particularly if there was no fabric conditioner in the final rinse. Obviously, its total absorption capability will be lower, but no one usually gets anywhere near saturating a towel when drying yourself.
Spin speeds are usually dictated by what wash setting you select. 1600 is often only recommended for cottons and towels whereas slower spin speeds are used for other preset wash programs.
So the question is, what's the failure mode when a bearing wears out?
They'll make a lot of noise, but that doesn't necessarily stop you using the machine.
They'll leak. Often, it's the bearing seal failing that allows water/detergent into the bearing which quickly wrecks it, but even if that wasn't the initial cause, lateral vibration of the drum shaft will cause the bearing seal to fail with the same effect. The older Hotpoints have a drain channel between the seal and the bearing so any water which gets past the seal can run out of the back of the drum, and you might notice a small puddle under the rear of the machine of black/gunky water, but probably not unless you pulled it out for some reason. If left like this, the drain hole blocks and the water then goes into the bearing, so it's never more than a short-term protection.
They can rust and seize, but a washing machine motor usually has enough force to overcome that.
The inner drum becomes sloppy and drops. You can easily spot this by seeing if you can lift the front edge and how far it wobbles without moving the outer drum with it. This eventually results in a catastrophic failure where the inner drum drops so far it catches on the outer drum and jams. This is most likely to happen with a full drum of wet clothes at top spin speed, and completely destroys the machine. I recall this happening to someone in this group maybe 20+ years ago. The inner drum dropped enough to catch on the heating element, which jammed it to the outer drum. The inertia wrenched the outer drum off its mountings and it did about 1/4 of a turn until the concrete weights on the top and bottom of the outer drum hit the sides of the machine and destroyed the kitchen cupboards either side of it.
At this point of the game a new machine has been decided on.
With nothing else to go on the latest Hotpoint model seems as good as any, as the current one (which replaced a Candy that was still fully functional after 14 years) has lasted 13 years.
It's now a question of will it last till Black Friday ?
When often the prices go up, especially on Amazon :)
We replaced our Hotpoint after 14 years, with the equivalent model.
Bearings lasted 13 months. New drum and bearings lasted about the same.
Made in a completely different factory. We got a Bosch.
That's often the problem with brand loyalty. If you had the previous item, say, ten years the new item from the same manufacturer "brand" may have nothing in common. If nothing else it's likely to have a different technology and a different design team. There is a good chance the brand has a different owner and the goods made in a different factory and/or country .
Hotpoint was a company who made white goods in Peterborough and was part of GEC (the UK one, not GE in the US). I worked for GEC at that time, and Hotpoint were really good for staff discount, and all the spares were easily available and cheap from CPC's white goods catalogue (which hasn't existed for years now). When I was leaving GEC, I found out that the staff discount was still available if you had a GEC pension. In my leaving speech, I joked that I would have left 10 years earlier if I'd known that beforehand - a comment which I wouldn't have remembered at all now, but every time I meet someone from that GEC office, they always remind me of it, so it went down very well at the time!
However, the brand name was sold to Merloni Brothers in Europe (who also owned Creda, Ariston, and other brand names) and they were made in Italy, nothing to do with the original manufacturers or products. The name has been sold again since then to Whirlpool I think (who ended up with the liability for the tumble driers which burst in to flames). In practice, all these old brand names are mostly owned by just a couple of manufacturers who make all the products now and brand them differently for each country. In the US, the Hotpoint brand name was sold to GE.
I kept my original Hotpoint washing machine going for 25 years, which included fitting a couple of replacement drum bearings, fixing a lead to the motor which broke due to vibration, and replacing the motor brushes which also blew the triac which did the top spin speed field winding, so I soldered a new one in.
Out of totally misplaced loyalty to the then meaningless brand name, I bought another Hotpoint which is 10 years old now, but it's doing OK, which is just as well, as almost nothing in it is serviceable.
I worked for Marconi/GEC and got a staff discount on a Hotpoint machine to find a month later that the local electrical shop was selling it at the same price.
Yep, I also used CPC for white goods spares in the days before the Internet really took off. Brushes for the Hotpoint washer motor (it seemed that they only lasted a few years) and a thermostat for fridge.
Mine lasted about 8 years with around 3 motor brush changes and a bearing change. The fault that killed it for me was a motor failure. I've never purchased the Hotpoint brand since.
My current machine is an Indesit purchased because it was VERY cheap. It is now 12 years old showing signs of rust and starting to get a bit noisy when spinning (bearings starting to go)
The work in 2017 did at least recognise that waste prevention (such as textile wear in laundry equipment) was missing from the Ecodedign parameters.
e.g.
"Ecodesign and Energy Label for Household Washing machines and washer dryers"
includes
"In the Ecodesign preparatory study ENER Lot 14, an increase from 1,200 to 1,600 rpm was considered as improvement option. There were machines with 1,800-2,000 rpm on the market at the end of nineties but they have disappeared meanwhile. According to stakeholder information there is a practical limit for the maximum spin speed at around 1,600 rpm, since higher spin speeds can hardly achieve any reduction in remaining moisture content but cause high costs. According to feedback from stakeholders, it has also to be considered that higher spin speeds bear the risk of earlier failure of certain parts of the washing machine, mainly the shock absorbers and the ball bearings, and require higher costs for better quality components. A high spin speed increases also the wrinkling of the laundry, which subsequent increases the energy demand of ironing, although this does not seem the major energy contribution to the washing-drying-ironing system (see section 4.1)."
For our Hotpoint washer, I will answer that...
There was no movement of the drum, no puddles of water on the floor, no marks on clothes and no special noise from the drum when it ran. The first indication of a problem, was when the washer was started on a program, when it attempted to turn the drum, it didn't/couldn't - obviously the motor has some sort of load, or rotation sensing.
Trying to turn the drum by hand, it felt a bit tight, rotating it a few turns, it became easier, free enough to do a few washes, allowing me time to order up new bearings and seals.
On pulling it apart, I found the bearings well rusted, and some rust on the shaft, which had to be cleaned up and smoothed, to avoid damaging the new seals.
Also a sign of the motor brushes worn down. When I first suspected motor brushes I removed the brushes and came to the conclusion that they were OK as they still have plenty of carbon left on them*. It wasn't I purchased replacements and found the new ones had around 3x the length of carbon.
*on putting back the old brushes the machine worked again for around a month. Possibly cleaning out the debris from the brush shoes gave enough additional movement for the spring to push the brushes out more.Just an update here that after some thought I decided to just order a new one, with removal of the old one for £20.
In the world I want to live in, I would have put a post of Facebook for a local repair bod to take it for free and ideally replace the bearing and maybe sell it to someone struggling with the CoL crisis.
However in reality I know I would be left with the old machine and no one to collect it. And leaving it out for the scrap merchants would simply see the motor removed and the rest left for me to dispose of.
The model I went for is a Hotpoint NSWM864CWUKN
They can deliver it and unpack it and take the packaging. I think I can plumb it in :)
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