I've moved into a newly-built house with brand new appliances. Our washing machine is Whirlpool brand.

On Saturday we threw a party, and a couple hours before the party, someone in our household started a wash load.

After the party, he went into the laundry room. The washing machine was still making a humming noise, as if it was doing something. However it had been several hours.

He opened the lid and the clothes were damp but there was no water. It was supposed to have reached a spin cycle but it wasn't yet spinning.

After he closed the lid again, it began spinning and completed the wash cycle normally, as if nothing had gone wrong.

Here's my hunch: The humming noise might have been the drainage pump. It was supposed to shut off when the machine emptied of water and move on to the spin cycle, but something prevented it from detecting that it had completed its drainage job. Perhaps a sensor malfunction.

So. If that's true, is our pump fubared because it tried to pump water for several hours, but only had air to pump? It seemed to complete its cycle, which included another rinse and spin, and that drained normally. Should I call out warranty service, or is everything OK provided the problem doesn't recur?

I'm not a hundred percent sure about US washing machines (you guys still use 50s vintage technology top loaders, right? ) but european machines use centrifugal pumps in which a plastic impeller spins in a housing with quite a lot of clearance. They can run dry pretty much indefinitely, as they usually have a fan mounted on the other end of the motor shaft to cool the coil. I'd be surprised if the US machines don't have a similar pump, in which case you should be fine.

pca

Hey, if it was good enough for grandpa, it's good enough for me.

Thanks, Patrick! That's a load off my mind. If the problem recurs, we'll call Whirlpool, but if not, we won't worry about it.

Who chose the appliances, you or the builder? If it's the builder, I'd go out of my way to make sure they fail, because I can guarantee you they're pieces of crap.

The house is a rental property, so it doesn't really matter. If the appliances fail down the road, it's still the landlord's responsibility.

We actually already had another Whirlpool appliance fail already. The gas range's electronic control panel kept getting religion; it kept dropping into Sabbath Mode where it wouldn't respond to any key input. Whirlpool sent a guy out who replaced the control panel parts for free under warranty, though we had to wait a week for the parts to arrive.

The European-style front-loaders are definitely invading. If you go appliance shopping now, you'll mostly see front-loaders with a few classical top-loaders off in a corner.

Ten years ago, I bought a perfectly good Maytag top-loader. Last month, it went belly-up, bad smoky smells, etc. We replaced it with a super-fancy (and insanely overengineered) Miele. The difference is staggering. It's lots quieter. It gets clothes cleaner. It uses much less water. It spins so fast that it can happily tear things to shreds if you're not careful.

When I was first dorking with it, I put some old throw-pillows in to see what would happen. Well, three of them basically covered the sides of the barrel while the fourth was poking somewhat inward. The tidal forces on that poor pillow tore the thing to shreds, spewing the polyester padding all over the machine.

Moral of the story: European-style washing machines are fantastic, but you have to actually think carefully about what spin speed you want.

Downsides, relative to the top-loader: a top-loader washing machine makes for a perfect beer storage cooler for a party. Just load it with ice and beer. When done, the ice melts and drains away. Can't really do that in a front-loader.

Also, I suppose, there's the mold issue. You have to leave the door open for the thing to dry out completely, otherwise water and rubber seals provide a nice breeding ground for assorted moldy bits.

That is a huge issue with my Maytag Neptune.

I remember going to Frys in Santa Clara a few years ago, and becoming very amused with the home appliances section. It was funny to see nice shiny 'european style' front loader machines, built using a top loader chassis that looked exactly like the machine I remember from growing up in Canada in the early 70s I mean, the thing even had all the controls along a console on the back top of the machine, unchanged from the top loader variant! It was so big there was no possibility of fitting it under a counter, which is surely one of the main reasons for even HAVING a front loader in the first place.

Meile machines are pretty much the top of the range. The first one of those I came across a few years ago was the only washing machine I'd seen based around an 80486. It was pretty amazing, with a full load on maximum spin all you ever heard was a faint rumbling noise. My Bosch unit is pretty quiet, but not to that level.

Mold is easy enough to deal with, just occasionally do a very hot wash with nothing in the machine, and use bleach instead of detergent.

pca

I don't know if it's necessarily any better than just the empty hot cycle, but I've been using this:

Affresh

Once a month in my front loader since I bought the machine this past spring. I was reading though the Consumer Reports forums and this was recommended over there. So far no problems, I do leave the door ajar whenever the machine is sitting idle however. Another product that was recommended from that forum was a product that is used to clean out hot tubs. I can't recall the name, but it was harder to find than the Affresh.

Updating this thread: The problem recurred, except the machine got stuck on a different part of the cycle, agitating my clothes for a couple hours instead of just a few minutes. The lint from that dryer load was insane. The brand-new shirt that was put into that load now looks like it's ten years old and well-worn-in. It's very soft, though.

Whirlpool repaced the timer assembly under warranty, no questions asked. I even placed the warranty repair order online, no time spent on the phone explaining it to anyone.

Odd that it's the second brand-new Whirlpool appliance I've had fail on me in the last couple of months...