Appliance karma

In the first six months of living in this apartment, we replaced every appliance in the house. We bought a new refridgerator on the second day we were here, then a washing machine and dryer, and lastly, a new stove.

A month ago, the top cover of the washer broke and the dryer, which is on it's top, started to tilt. I took the cover off and found that it was only glued together (quality construction). I made a bracket out of the kids' "sticks" wooden toys and the cover was almost good as new, only better.

About two weeks ago, the washing machine started to act funny. I was pretty frustrated after the cover so I ignored it for a week, hoping it would just go away (that always work, doesn't it?). Keep in mind that we do laundry about every other day (small machine and four people), so I couldn't really ignore it for too long. When I tried to pull out the cover to clean out the drain (I'm told that a common problem is a clogged drain), it was jammed, so my assumption was that something was stuck inside of it or the motor had self-destructed and jammed the cover.

I took a first stab at it about a week ago and realized that the engineers who design washing machines are not the same ones who design cars. Subsequently, nothing about the repair was intuitive for me. I quickly got frustrated and walked away.

This morning, I made my second attempt. Yesterday, I did laundry by manually draining washer by opening the drain cover every time I heard the pump whine but not work. After that, I decided I couldn't really put this off any longer.

I propped the washing machine at an angle so that I could access the pump through the open bottom. Only after I removed one pipe from the pump and splashed water all over myself, then I then saw the backs of screws right in front of me. I went around to the front of the machine and found a hidden plastic cover. Underneath were screws! I removed them and the front cover of the washing machine came off revealing the picture above.

I finally had good access to the pump and removed the other hose. Inside I found a sock (pictured below). One of Mims. It was clogging the hose from the wash basin to the pump. This meant the pump was spinning but not pumping. I removed it, put everything back together again, and viola, our washer works.

That is, until I tried to open the door after the test cycle and found that it wouldn't open. A couple of tries and I got it to work. It's been an intermittent problem for awhile, but I guess it's my next project...