A week ago I was doing my laundry on Saturday when I realized that the load seemed to be taking…hours. When I looked at the minutes-remaining readout, I realized it actually was taking hours. Every time it got down to the point where the final spin should kick it, it looped back to the beginning of the wash cycle.
Consulting Google, I did what I could—the appliance version
of the three fingered salute (unplugging, waiting five minutes, plugging in,
restarting), but same thing.
Even when I set it to Spin Only, it jumped back to wash and
started adding water.
Disconsolately I wrung out the clothes, hung them on the
drying rack until they were in a state that I could toss them in the dryer. On
Monday I called the appliance repair guy and he came out on Tuesday.
Understand that this machine—bought three years ago when my
old, mechanical-only washer finally expired—is packed with electronics. As it
is, I had to look really hard to find one that isn’t “smart”, but it’s still
computerized and I was envisioning having to replace something expensive.
Well, Alan posited that the machine—like a lot of modern,
agitator-free top-loaders—is very sensitive to load imbalance, and was probably
trying to reset the load. I couldn’t think that what I had in that particular
collection of clothes was markedly different from the hundreds of others I have
run since it arrived. A few times, when I was washing mattress pads, the
machine would go ballistic and I’d have to turn it off, adjust the placement
and then start again. (These modern jobbers don’t have knobs you can pull out
to continue where you left off.) He then had me run through a load on speed
wash, just to see how it went.
Well, we chatted around the machine for about 20 minutes,
and sure enough, it worked just fine. He charged me a call-out fee, and as he
was leaving, he noticed a bird’s nest in my dryer vent, next to the front door.
He checked for eggs—none—and then brought out a kind of mini-chimney sweep
device, with long poles connecting to a drill, and cleaned out what must have
been 20 years of lint from that dryer conduit.
It’s a miracle that I haven’t had a fire in the nine years
I’ve been here.
Well, Saturday, I filled the washer with my colored clothes
and turned the machine on. Let me tell you: then I saw it click over into the
spin cycle I was filled with such gratitude. You cannot believe how wonderful
it is to have a washing machine that works.
And then, when I dumped the clothes in the dryer, it was
wonderful again, knowing I wasn’t risking conflagration.
Life is good.
©2026 Bas Bleu
