Last weekend my daughter wanted to lounge on the couch. I reminded her that her bedroom was not fully clean and her wash was not done. She gave a huge sigh, went upstairs and proceeded to put her completely full, utterly ginormous hamper into the washer. Needless to say I wasn't there when she did it and found out when the cycle finished and she came to tell me "my load is still really wet." You think??? A dead washer is a crisis of epic proportions in our house. There are 5 of us living here and my wife has a cleaning business that engenders a lot of wash on its own. Easily we do 4 loads of wash daily.
Elisabeth steadfastly maintains that she did not know this would break the washer. I suspect that although she did not know that, she DOES know how to properly load a washer and just in that moment did not give two flying fig newtons about what would happen. If you have gleaned that this annoyed me, you would be right. She is almost 15 and has been doing laundry for quite a while. It was an impetuous act of anger.
Now this is all further complicated by the fact that our machines came from Sears which is now defunct. Because they were going out of business I opted not to re-enroll in the product protection agreement. I felt that might also go the way of the once great stores and I didn't want my money tied up there. Local appliance people (all two of them) do not work on Kenmores.
Youtube to the rescue. I did some research and discovered that our model does not have a belt. It has something called a motor-stator and that was what probably needed to be replaced. I ordered it on line and my wife and I watched the youtube video over and over as if it would somehow impress the instructions into our little brains.
The part arrived and we took off the back of the washer. No problem. We tried to remove the cover to the motor stator. Problem. The nifty spin and pull maneouver they show in the video did nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. We both tried. I am really fairly strong after a year of renovation. I carry drywall, put up walls, rip up floors. But this? Nothing worked. My wife tried. No joy.
She called a friend and he came over with his son. They could not move it with the youtube system either.However they did devise a system where one person held hte barrel of the washer (this is a front loader) while the other backed out the bolt and that worked like a charm.
They left, and we found that there were 5 more bolts to fight with. We tried with no success but it was honestly late and we were tired having worked all day. Today, my wife tried while I was at work and the next thing I knew I had a text with a vid of our washer working! No more laundramat nights! And I suspect my teen daughter has learned a valuable lesson as several times she had to wait longer than usual for a preferred outfit to be clean. And, another skill in our toolbox of tricks!
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