My washing machine has just fallen apart inside accompanied by much loud graunching noise. The drum seems to have broken away from its bearings and is very loose, and I can hear other bits rattling around as I push the drum round by hand. Fortunately it was into its rinse cycles and was coming to the end of a spin, so there was only damp rinsed washing to cope with. It's almost exactly ten years old (bought July 2019) so I reckon it's time to replace it.
Some years ago, probably about the time I bought this one, direct drive washing machines seemed to be the latest thing. I only see one or two advertised these days out of the huge range to choose from. Are they actually any better than (I presume) belt-drive ones? If so, what advantages do they offer if any?
I can think of one possible advantage, but I don't know whether it would actually make any difference in reality - belt drives seem to have quite a high tension and that puts a significant and constant side load on the drum's rear bearing.
There may be some possibility of accelerating the wear a little and many machines seem to have bearings that are difficult or even impossible to replace these days.
I would imagine if it were a factor the drive motor would be above the drum in order to counterbalance the planets G force.
I,m not aware of anyone adopting the design for domestic machines, so I would guess that the savings in wear are negligble. Should there be a saving, everyone would top mount the drive motor and scrape a few grams of metal from the bearing no doubt.
I assume you mean 2009, but anyway, are you sure its not just the big masses attached, or the springs that have gone? If it indeed the drum broken away from its bearing that might well be something the maker might be interested in, since I've never ever had tat fail, bearings get rusty and leak but fall apart?
They were supposed to be more reliable and had less or fewer belts and gears and stuff like that. I think, however, that they do still fail, so it really depends on the water protection and engineering of the design. Brian
There are issues these days however about the usability and long life or otherwise of touch screen operated washing machines. Many companies are going this route, which I feel they will live to regret as so many people find problems coping with complex touch operated menus and trying to read the display, when in the olden days they got used to the number of clicks for each program. The very latest ones seem to also be controllable on your mobile or from smart speakers. Fine but if any of this tech goes belly up you are stuffed. Brian
I have just got another Iphone with Siri voice recognising commands, I'm am quite surprised at how good Siri is at recognising and acting on the words.
The tech has already gone belly-up. This is from a few days ago:
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Not sure if your screen reader can read the page, but the gist of it is that a few days ago Google had an outage:
"Last night, Google reported several issues with its Cloud Platform, which made several Google sites slow or inoperable. Because of this, many of Google?s sites and services?including Gmail, G Suite, and YouTube?were slow or completely down for users in the U.S. and Europe.
But an especially annoying side effect of Google Cloud?s downtime was that Nest-branded smart home products for some users just failed to work. According to reports from Twitter, many people were unable to use their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras during the downtime. This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies."
That just shows the stupidity of a system dependant on remote servers. For the home to be "smart" it should have a local server too.
If I want to increase the temperature of my home there should be a local voice command interpreter, only referring to the remote server for complex commands.
Next it'll say, "20 degrees is quite warm enough; put on a sweater."
Once a critical mass of smart meters, and smart devices are reached then the government will do that, so that emission targets can be met. Anyone wanting to warm a space above 19 degrees will pay a premium.
No Brian, the drum (the bit that goes round) must have come away from something, as it can be moved up and down and side to side relative to the casing, and rubs on the casing when you try to turn it, which you can do but it's very stiff and there are nasty noises from inside when you do that, as of loose bits of metal. It wasn't like that last week
- wasn't loose, wasn't stiff to turn and didn't make loose-metal noises. Something has disintegrated, I'm sure, but ICBA to find out what. I've had ten years out of it, and that's quite good enough for me to justify getting a new one.
You are quite correct. In this case, as for BSA's error in replacing the drive side crankshaft ball bearing in the Triumph Bonneville engine with a roller bearing (presumably in the mistaken belief that it would cope better with the resulting drive thrust bias since they let the timing side retain the original ball race bearing), it's the out of balance high speed rpm loading that trumps such modest sidethrust bias induced wear (and by a very wide margin) every time.
In the case of the BSA built Bonneville engines, to compound their gross engineering incompetence (which goes all the way back to pre-war years), they'd not only overlooked the fact that such a high revving engine (compared to their own efforts at making a 650cc parallel twin which had no reserve for tuning to a similar output by virtue of poor quality materials and inadequacies in their design by way of structural reserves to cope with even modest performance tuning attempts) with a flexible crankshaft only supported by the engine case bearings would require a bearing type that would, unlike the roller bearing replacement, tolerate this dynamic misalignment stress, namely a ballrace type.
It took a mere 14,000 miles to totally knacker the roller bearing whilst the ballrace timing side bearing (which got changed out anyway along with the roller bearing) was still as good as new. Unfortunately, I missed the opportunity to correct this mistake the first time I replaced the bearings, foolishly fitting a roller bearing on the drive side instead of fitting ballraces both sides.
Unfortunately, by the time this happened again at the 28,000 mile mark, I'd managed to snap both sparkplugs in my attempts to change them out and never got the chance to put the bike back on the road. Hopefully, the new owner whom I had appraised of BSA's engineering vandalism, will see a damn sight more than 50,000 miles of wear and tear out of a replacement set of ballrace bearings.
As with motorbike engines, it's the high speed spin cycle that stresses washing machine drum bearings to the limit (and beyond with some makes). The side thrust loading pales into insignificance by comparison.
Incidentally, direct drive does offer advantages over the use of a drum, belt driven from a universal ac/dc motor with the extra frictional and electrical losses of carbon brush/commutator gear and the order of magnitude faster spin speeds of an armature with windings that are uncomfortably close to exploding out of the armature slots due to centripetal force.
Until the profiteering exploitation of the modern brushless DC motor is dialled back a few notches to that which currently applies with the older ac/dc motor technology, the ROI in electricity and maintenance savings are unlikely to be realised over the typical lifetime of a domestic washing machine.
For now, the pragmatic choice is to stick with the tried and tested belt drive technology until the reduced manufacturing costs of direct drive force the manufacturers to relent in their exploitation of the BLDC direct drive system as their latest cash cow innovation.
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