About a week ago, our clothes washer began giving troubles. It was struggling to drain and spin the wet load. A little rebalancing and a little luck got us a few more loads of clothes.
Alas, this morning, I fired it up with a load of whites, a smallish load compared to our dark washes. Its first attempt stalled. I dialed up a rinse and spin cycle, with my fingers crossed.
Bzzzzzt. Wrong answer.
The poor machine struggled to run, and ultimately it tripped the GFI circuit.
Boo. Soaked clothes, broken washer, and no fun.
Short term, I fished out the clothes, and hung them on a pop-up rack in the back yard to get them dry enough to toss into the dryer.
My wife? She was insistent that we should call a service man. I tried to tell her that was probably a bad idea.
Our current washer/dryer
In 2003, when we moved to Tucson, we purchased these units new. They are Maytag’s Neptune front loader units. At the time I didn’t do a lot of research, but my stepfather was an appliance repairman, and I spent my summers tagging along and learning how to fix just about anything.
He advised that the Maytags were good units. They were computerized, but not too much so. In fact he said that these were simple to keep running. Easy-peasy, decision made.
Alas, after the fact, I read that there were issues with seals, and mildew buildup, things that could be troublesome, but our units were no problems. In fact, they are 22 years old, and that is pretty long to keep these appliances alive in this day and age (and frankly, even the era of all mechanical units from the 60’s and 70’s would have all their controls replaced a couple of times to last this long.)
So, 22 years is really good.
The net result
But, my wife was insisting on calling a serviceman out to try to fix them. I grumbled and said that nobody would want to work on units this old, and parts would be difficult to come by.
After this morning, I realized that my past experiences in the space I could replace the drain pump should I need to.
Fortunately, my wife did a little googling about repairs for our vintage of machines, and from the Ask and Answer site, a 30+ year appliance repairman was responding to someone who wanted to work on this vintage of machines, and his advice was “Throw them out. They are 20 years old. They are not worth repairing. The parts are sketchy, and there’s a reason why Maytag ended this series 18 years ago. They weren’t that great then, but they are 100% not worth repairing.
So, we have a new washer/dryer on the way from Lowes. The 4th of July sales is knocking about 20% off the price, and we have new front loaders on the way. And we are beating the tariff increases.
It was not cheap, but I figure that our 22 years from that set, after moving twice, is damned good life.
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