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Dark clouds gathering — 12 Comments

    • It seems to be doing a fair job even with my current detergent. Maybe I’ll just stick with it…..

    • If God had intended us to wash everything by hand he wouldn’t have invented the washing machine.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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