Eeek!
Lucky the UK is addicted to front-loading washing machines. At least then all you have to worry about is the waterproof seal failing (as well as everything else like heater elements etc).
Samsung: And for my next trick – exploding WASHING MACHINES
Samsung's bad month gets worse as the South Korean electronics giant warns that some of its washing machines may halt and catch fire. The tech giant says it is working with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) on a plan to fix top-loading washing machines prone to what Samsung terms "abnormal vibrations", or as the …
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Thursday 29th September 2016 10:36 GMT Jason 24
Re: Eeek!
My grandma still runs a top loading washing machine, so I've always assumed these were the old way, and front loaders are newer and better. I can always remember having a front loader since being a kid.
A quick Google shows that front loaders will clean better, spin faster, use less water, and use less energy. but cost a few quid more.
A case of the US lagging behind?
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Thursday 29th September 2016 16:50 GMT cd
Re: Eeek!
I have a US-made top-loading horizontal axis machine. Best of both worlds, can add clothes mid-wash, can't leak from front door seals because there's no front door. Simply constructed, easy to service, warranty involves them shipping replacement parts and instructions. Used in off-grid homes because they use little power and water, which is where I first encountered one.
http://www.staber.com/washingmachines
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Saturday 1st October 2016 18:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Eeek!
"Top loading". The entire reason seems to stem from space. UK has smaller places to live in, so we go for front loading, with a cupboard/work surface above. You need extra space generally for a top loading.
Once something becomes common, then social pressure and idiocy kicks in and people refuse to change. If you asked for a top loading in a general UK store, you'd get looked at like you were weird. Though we do still have them in some places, and no doubt they are ok... but a lot of us have no experience with them, so they are also an unknown quantity.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 17:39 GMT MSmith
Re: Eeek!
My top-loader died after only 15 years of service (the tub bearing wore out). When looking for a new washer, the front loaders were (1) bigger in size and wouldn't fit in my old house's laundry room, (2) two to three times as expensive, and (3) didn't seem to save any electricity or water. The new top loaders use a lot less water than the old ones (that filled the tub up every time), but still have that option for something really filthy. The big problem with front loaders in the US is mold and mildew. Top-loaders normally have the lid open when not in use to let the water evaporate. Leaving the door on the front-loader open usually isn't convenient because it blocks an exit or hallway, so they often build up mold and mildew inside. Several of my friends with front-loaders have gotten rid of theirs and gone back to top-loaders because of this.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 11:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Eeek!
you can *most* of the time with a front loader too. we have a nice Siemens washing machine and 9/10 it will let me, but sometimes I'll get a water level too high message and it won't let me and I'll need to wait a while. The new Samsung machines have a little hatch higher up the door that you can use to put stuff in.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 10:52 GMT fajensen
Re: Eeek!
"Lucky" is the product name of a new front-loading washing that is equipped with strong and flexible tentacles claimed to be for sorting, loading and folding the laundry - but - which are really tools for strangulating us in our sleep, cut our bodies into itty-bitty pieces and run the pieces down the waste disposer.
I hear noises in the basement at night. I hope it doesn't do stairs.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 11:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Eeek!
Lucky the UK is addicted to front-loading washing machines. At least then all you have to worry about is the waterproof seal failing (as well as everything else like heater elements etc).
Unless you forget to take the Samsung Note 7 out of the clothes you're about to wash.
I am now waiting for YouTube videos of people putting Samsung Note 7s in a Samsung US top loading washing machine. That combination might go critical.
It's a good thing you're not allowed to bring a washing machine onto an airplane. No, wait..
:)
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Thursday 29th September 2016 11:24 GMT inmypjs
Re: Eeek!
"addicted to front-loading washing machines"
They are as likely to destroy themselves if allowed to spin a badly imbalanced load.
Amazed this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vROdVsU_K80 hasn't already been linked.
I would say the most likely cause of the Samsung problem is the imbalance detector failing, however, I read comment somewhere about plastic mounts failing
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Thursday 29th September 2016 15:54 GMT MotionCompensation
Re: Eeek!
Where I live, top loaders are the norm. They do the job in in under 30 minutes and they are cheap. But they tend to wear your clothes out faster and they use lots of water. Most people here use cold water, forget about heating the amount of water a top loader needs.
I switched to a front loader, got tired of buying new clothes all the time. A better name for a top loader is a clothes shredder or bacteria incubator.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 07:12 GMT Dan 55
Re: Maybe someone left their Note 7 in an item of washing?
If not, perhaps a Galaxy Core Prime. Or maybe the Galaxy S7 Edge.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 06:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Laugh if you will, Steve K
But Li-ion batteries in washing can and do explode. I am pretty sure this occured once with an old ancient machine, on Valentine's evening. Talk about bad timing, had 1" of water on the floor and the mains trip went but it could have been a lot worse.
The drum evidently failed at max RPM, did find some debris suggesting that *something* blew up but never found out exactly what.
AC/DC
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Thursday 29th September 2016 10:52 GMT Chz
Re: Competition
Eh, depends. Whirlpool owns a fuckton of different brands in all sorts of markets. Certainly their Maytag and KitchenAid stuff isn't awful.
My tumble dryer is a branded Whirlpool and seems alright. Mainly because being a heat pump unit it's quite unlikely to self-combust like some of their other products. I do occasionally worry about it having been the cheapest heat pump on the market at the time, but really there's nothing inherently more complicated about them than a resistance dryer so I'm assuming the price premium is for being new and fancy.
Now my old Hoover dryer. It didn't catch fire, it just melted the plug into goo. But that's Candy group, and they specialise in making shit.
I'll give credit to Beko for being cheap and reasonably durable in certain things. Their dishwashers seem pretty decent.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 12:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Competition
My Beko dishwasher packed in one day. Turned out the black tar had melted on the back and it had burned through the insulation on the wire.
Apparently you're not supposed to put their under-counter dishwashers under the counter and it was my fault.
( It was out of warranty, so I just bought a new one as we didn't want to do without ). Also we have a Beko oven/grill. Terrible, awful quality. It was cheap, but I didn't expect to have this many problems - I thought Beko made good stuff.
I'll never be buying Beko again.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 10:57 GMT fajensen
Re: Competition
And Indesit, rhymes with In-The-Shit. So you remember what it means to be the owner of one of these.
Total crap featuring stretched point-to-point wiring and four-corner panels fixed with 2 screws and two slits. Getting a pump out of one of these was like open heart surgery, I had to use tools to keep all the "organs" apart for reaching the pump.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 18:20 GMT BitDr
Whirlpool...
We have Whirlpool Duet front load washer and gas dryer, they are now 11 years old and the washer motor needs new brushes (it sometimes throws an error during spin cycle), the dryer is functioning as new. We must have purchased before the bean-counters started to use inferior materials in an effort to increase shareholder value.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 07:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Competition
Avoid anything from the Electrolux group, they tend to fall apart or rust to hell.
We've got cheap as chips Beko.
Last one went 8 years (including reusable nappies) and the current one is going strong
Had to replace seals and bushes, but I don't mind paying £50 every 5 years to keep it going.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 11:19 GMT Bloakey1
Re: Competition
<snip>
"Had to replace seals and bushes, but I don't mind paying £50 every 5 years to keep it going."
That sounds a bit like Trigger's Broom.
http://tinyurl.com/htkl3gy
I had a Dyson washing machine that was not good at all, thankfully a Bosch was put in and peace and quiet was resumed.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 14:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Competition
I had a Dyson washing machine that was not good at all, thankfully a Bosch was put in and peace and quiet was resumed.
If you have a kid with eczema, there's really no better machine than a Bosch. That is, provided you tell the engineer about this the first time the door seal appears to rub - the oils in the ointments dissolves the seal that is fitted by default and you'll discover this at most three months in. When informed, the engineer will replace that seal with a nitrile based one (slightly darker in colour) at which point you'll have a trustworthy machine that will outlast its warranty many times over. Our machine is basically as old as my oldest, and she's about to start driving lessons now. And it still works.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 11:32 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: Competition
> We've got cheap as chips Beko.
When we moved to our current place in 1997 we had to buy a separate fridge and freezer so we bought nice cheap Beko units on the basis that, if we had to replace them in five years, we wouldn't have lost too much.
They are still in place. Admittedly, the freezer door seal is getting slightly flaky and you have to give the door a bit of a push to make sure it's sealed properly but they both still work fine.
The kitchen/utility/dining room are all going to get remodeled at somepoint soon so we might replace them then.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 07:06 GMT Joe Werner
"Exploding"?
Sounds like vibrating apart. An explosion is caused by a fast, often exothermal reaction that creates a lot of gas very quickly (at least that's what I think an explosion is). Surely this is a bit like one of them old drum storages running in "horizontal mode", happily skipping along the floor...
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Thursday 29th September 2016 07:18 GMT GrumpenKraut
Re: "Exploding"?
> An explosion is ...
Not sure this is much of a consolation for the owners of those "forcibly redecorated" homes.
One wonders why there is no mechanism to throttle/stop the spinning once a certain acceleration is detected. I recall that one washing machine I owned did exactly that: it would stop the spinning, rotate back and forth a few times, then try anew. Hence I could wash and spin, say, a heavy blanket just fine even though the machine was surprisingly light.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 10:40 GMT Jason 24
Re: "Exploding"?
"I recall that one washing machine I owned did exactly that: it would stop the spinning, rotate back and forth a few times, then try anew."
My current samsung (front loader!) eco bubble does that if it finds the load is unbalanced, swishes round a couple of times to try and level it before going hammer and tongs on the spin cycle. A couple of times with a big heavy sheet it's refused to spin.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 07:24 GMT BongoJoe
I had one of these top loaders explode on me when I was living in Norway. It turned out that the spring on the door of the stainless steel drum failed causing the inner door to open when on maximum spin cycle.
Needless to say the bits from the drum catching on the inside of the external box at full speed wasn't at all healthy for the washing machine as a whole and 'explosion' is a good description of what happened next.
Though it was purely mechanical in nature and nothing to do with expanding gases; other than of mine as I was about two feet from it at the time...
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Thursday 29th September 2016 07:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Flood
I was living in a flat over a hairdressers shop and our front loading W/M was leaky so we always got complaints. So I fixed it with silicon and stood the machine on plastic sheeting. That seemed to work for a while! Then the woman from downstairs was at the front door saying that water was dripping down. My partner said that was not possible because the machine was empty and not in use. To prove the point she opened the door. It wasn't empty, it was 100% full of water, so much that it was impossible to see so. She slammed the door shut but a sock had been swept half out and the entire drum emptied through the floorboards and into the downstairs shop. It was very funny to watch but our lease was not renewed after that.
Lessons learned:
1) Never buy a Hotpoint
2) Never buy a machine that has an aluminium back to the drum. At the joint with the drum it get corroded away. (maybe by Electrolysis). Hence the original leak
3) Never buy a Hotpoint
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Thursday 29th September 2016 09:02 GMT Tom Paine
Re: Flood
> 1) Never buy a Hotpoint
Ah, crap. My landlord's just kindly spec'd a complete refit of my tiny galley kitchen (mostly as a pretext to bumping the rent up £250, so I'm already not too thrilled about it, especially as the existing stuff is perfectly serviceable even if it IS 30 years old and a little worn.) Anyway, guess which brand of appliances they've gone for... /o\
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Thursday 29th September 2016 12:58 GMT BongoJoe
Re: Flood
1) Never buy a Hotpoint
We've got a Hotpoint clothes drier. We're on the list to get it repaired because the model we have tends to catch fire.
Our date for when the engineer comes around is March of next year so either they have millions of units to fix or they're not taking our safety and well being as strongly as they claim.
Anyway as long as he doesn't come during the Cheltenham Festival week then that will be fine.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 07:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
But..
I have a Hotpoint.
Any ideas, other than "Spend $$$ on another machine even though it works fine" ?
It seems OK for now, I have a science degree so am fully aware of the dangers of rapidly spinning things going into spontaneous disassembly, it happened (once!) at Uni where some eejit loaded an ultracentrifuge with the wrong sort of test tubes and it demolecularized with extreme prejudice all over the lab. They also had a near miss when someone decided to "accidentally" load test the big power transformer outside by putting a pneumatic drill bit through one of the phases resulting in the mother of all repair bills and many fried boards on the nCube.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
