Dark clouds gathering
I’m in a bad mood.
Aha! I hear you cry, you’re always in a bad mood.
That may or may not be true, but today I’m in an even badder mood than normal.
It has been an expensive few weeks. I had a cracked oil tank that had to be replaced, and a dog that required expensive treatment. Then there is some new fencing that has to be erected to replace a fence that has collapsed. The funds are taking a hammering.
Now I suspect the washing machine is on the blink.
I put in a wash this morning [amn’t I incredibly well domesticated?] and what was unusual was that I went to empty the machine when the cycle finished. This is indeed unusual as I normally leave it in the machine to fester for days until I could be bothered to clear the drying rack which involves sorting stuff into underwear/tops/bottoms/whatever which is a pain in the arse. The drying rack was actually clear this morning, hence the decision to empty the machine.
Everything was cold.
It should at the very least be warm and damp.
It was damp all right and the wash appeared to be reasonably well washed so I cleared everything onto the rack. I put in another wash just to see what would happen.
Fucking cold again!
So the heater part is fucked. Do I get a mechanic out to fix it or do I replace the machine? I gave this question long and hard thought and decided after about ten seconds that a new one is in order [though not yet on order].
We’ve had the existing machine for around twenty years and I never liked it much anyway. It had two flaws – the drying cycle never really worked even after two hours of churning and the filter is at the back of the machine which is fucking insane. If the filter blocks up I have to haul the machine out from its very tight fit, remove the back and then unhitch a rubber hose to get at the filter.
So maybe the time has come to get a new one.
I’ll have a go first with a few judicious thumps with a hammer and maybe take the back off [the machine is a complete bitch to slide out]. You never know?
One way or another, the mood is still bad.
You could try using a detergent designed for cold water washing. Worth a try?
It seems to be doing a fair job even with my current detergent. Maybe I’ll just stick with it…..
I handwash.
If God had intended us to wash everything by hand he wouldn’t have invented the washing machine.
Keep it going if you can, the one you replace it with will be throwaway crap by comparison, with almost certainly a sealed drum so unable to replace the heating element if that is what is wrong with the present one.
I have a feeling my current one is just throwaway crap also. It’s the old story – every model is discontinued the day after you buy one.
I worked out years ago that it’s never worth having one professionally repaired, just the call-out and labour charges sink that – if it goes wrong and I can’t immediately fix it myself, it’s scrap.
Just buy the cheapest available, they all wash clothes adequately, it’ll have at least a couple of years of warranty anyway, chances are it’ll last 5 to 10 years, whenever it goes wrong and you can’t fix it, bin it and start again. Our current cheapie is more than 10 years old and still working fine. Less than £200, that’s £20 a year, less than 50p a week.
No doubt Gurning Greta would be heartbroken, but she’s not going to do my washing or pay for the repairman, stuff the polar bears.
Maybe I can just move it out into the garden and fill the drum with rocks – film the result and become an Interweb sensation?
Petrol can and some fireworks possibly!
Could you connect it to the hot water system and fill it with hot water?
I fear that trying to fix it will be futile. I have attempted a couple of times over the last 30 years. It is hard to take them apart and then impossible to get the suspect bit out.
At least I ended up with a pile of scrap that I could easily take to the dump and put in the appropriate bins.
The machines are made of well designed bits all to be clipped together with minimal human help – the expensive bit and one that introduces errors.
That gives you a really low cost machine.
I once worked with a mechanical engineer, in the Continental sense, not a man with a hammer, who had previously worked with JCB.
He explained that what the user wanted was a machine that worked reliably for a long time and then one day comprehensively disintegrated. No faffing about keeping spares, skilled repair staff, time diagnosing and repair.
So for JCB any component parts that lasted too long was over-engineered and probably excessively expensive.
If materials are recyclable then this policy is not un-green.
The current moves to have things repairable could have unintended consequences.
Think of low power energy saving mains vacuum cleaners which led to battery powered ones on charge 23.75 hours per day. Nice one, EU.
Manufacturers are the reason for the throw away society.