My front-loading washing machine has started making a nasty noise during the spin cycle. I suspect that SWMBO has overloaded it and that the bearings are now shot.

How do I confirm this? Or should I just bite the bullet and call out the repairman?

The bearings on these things tend to be oversized, I doubt overloading it would damage them. Unless you're washing steel.

How about recording the sound?

Brand? Model? Year/age?

Hoover HNL7146. About 5 years old.

How cool/warm is the location where the washing machine is used?

A little advertised fact about Samsung (not your brand, but..) front-loaders is that they will not operate below about 60 degrees F. Some models even detect the ambient temperature and refuse to run, or spin more slowly than normal.

The reason being, they use a special bearing lubricant that doesn't work at cooler temperatures.

This is why we ended up getting a modern top-loader rather than a front-loader here last spring -- our laundry area is in a mostly unheated basement. The modern (Maytag) top-loader spins almost as quickly as a front-loader, but the bearings are not stressed as much by the top-loader design.

Overall, it's a surprisingly efficient machine, not at all like the older top-loader it replaced.

Cheers

I have had bearings go on a Hotpoint front loader. The noise was like a very metallic grinding. When replacing them the cause of the failure was obvious, the seal on the shaft had failed allowing water into the bearing leading to the inevitable.

Could the underwire from one of SWMBO bras be caught on the outside of the drum? Not that I know anything about your wife's bras, or anything....

It wasn't the bearings. In the end, we called out a repair guy. It turns out to have been the concrete block. It was no longer secured properly. Fixed.

He also pointed out that, had it been the bearings, and even though new bearing sets only cost about £5-10, the work involved (and labour cost) to replace them is prohibitive, and a new washing machine is about the only answer.

Gotta love those blocks.. I dismantled our old top-loader to make it easier to cart out from the basement, and that concrete block was one of the heavier pieces.

The cast-iron (or steel?) tub was the heaviest, though. I think it weighed more than the entire new washing machine does.

Cheers