I was quite impressed by the more modern day "Tricity Bendix" (a fourteen years old re-badged Zanussi) which I had to repair a week or so back. The innards looked as pristine as the day it was made (the poor old
16A 700v triac, otoh, only *looked* pristine - it had finally succumbed to the abuse our youngest son had been meting out to the machine[1].I was quite surprised to see such an *actual* improvement in washing machine design in the intervening two decades between the 1983 Servis Quartz that I'd kept running right up until the day we swapped it out for that Tricity Bendix. If the current crop of Zanussi based washing machines have maintained this standard, I for one, am only too happy to recommend the brand.
Once our youngest (now a 35 year old "Twenty Something" Kidult) had tracked down a YT video showing how to split the casing on a Zanussi machine that looked the spitting image of our "Tricity Bendix AW 1400 W", it proved a remarkably easy machine to work on. Also, thanks to my youngest, I've replaced said triac and still have another five 'spares'.
I suspect his motivation to order one from an ebay trader, then another five from Farnell the next day to get a quicker delivery in case we
*actually* had to wait a whole 8 days for the first order to arrive, was partially out of 'guilt' and mainly out of the need to get his next load of washing washed and dried (see [1] and [2] below).When we realised the machine had an actual show stopping fault rather than it being a case of it 'sulking', his first reaction was to suggest that it immediately be replaced with a brand new machine, poo pooing my initial reaction that it would be worth taking a closer look at its innards with a view to repairing it unless some expensively critical component had failed. It took only a day for my point of view to sink in [2] before he was glibly volunteering to order the replacement triac at his own expense.
The first 800v version ordered on the Friday night from an Ebay trader, I know had cost him £5.45. The following day's Farnell order for a 5 pack of the 700v triacs, I believe a price of seven quid or so was briefly mentioned. When I later asked him what he'd paid Farnell, he avoided answering the question and the delivery note didn't show the price paid, so my best guess is that he must have shelled out some 13 quid or more just to speed up the repair process. Not a lot of money in the wider scheme of things (pocket change, really) when you consider his initial suggestion that we spend a good three to four hundred quid on a replacement machine.
[1] He's been doing this for the past decade or so, cramming a week's worth of his washing into the drum in the hope of getting the job done in one fell swoop, overcompensating by selecting the longest and most arduous of wash programme cycles available rather than splitting it and using two seperate shorter but more effective wash cycles that would still take less time than the longer cycle. He does the same thing with the tumble drier (even on good weather drying days) by selecting the maximum heated tumble dry cycle when a much shorter one will suffice. That thirteen quid or so he spent on triacs is a small enough token of atonement indeed. [2] Also in retrospect, I suspect he could have been thinking, "If the old fool must insist on attempting a repair, the sooner he fails, the sooner we can order a new machine.". Mind you, if he *had* been thinking this, his enthusiasm to help was convincing enough to hide any such thoughts. He should go far in today's world of "Corporate Bullshit Management"(tm). :-)