Exploding Washing Machines On Watchdog

On last night’s BBC consumer program, Watchdog, Indesit washing machine models were highlighted for their tendency to “explode” destroying the washing machine and causing considerable damage to their surroundings.

Watchdog’s report centres on two specific models of washing machine from Indesit, the WIXL143 and the W1X E167.

You can see the full report in the embedded video below:

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You can read the full report (although, there isn’t a lot more content than the video) from the BBC’s Watchdog website.

However, we’ve seen a lot more than this sort of thing happening over the years and, not just from Indesit.

In our forums members have posted of similar instances as far back as 2010, such as in this thread. Which ultimately led us to publish a news article late in 2010 on exactly this sort of failure, which you can see here.

So to us, this isn’t exactly news.

Not Just Indesit

It is easy to point the finger at Indesit and, to be fair, they are more liable to get caught out given that they are the largest supplier of washing machines in the UK since they own the Hotpoint brand as well as others so, volume wise in washing machines, they eclipse all the rest with we believe about a 28% market share.

Therefore given that almost one in three washing machines sold in the UK is an Indesit based machine, the chances are, they would be one of the ones with the most risk of exposure to any problems. It doesn’t mean that they actually have the most.

Not that we’re saying Indesit are brilliant, we’re not. Just putting things into perspective.

On the subject of throwing some perspective on the matter, here’s a report about exploding Candy washing machines we published in 2011. They can also be branded as Hoover as Candy owns the Hoover brand.

If you look you will see a startling similarity to the failures seen on the Indesit washing machines on Watchdog. In fact, there were even more we reported on here, here and also here which shows that it is not by any means an isolated incident.

We’re pretty sure that there will be others out there that have still to come to light.

It is important to keep in mind though that, during the recent debacle over exploding washing machine door glasses we crunched some numbers and we calculated that there are 30-40 million washing machines in daily domestic use in the UK and using the averages provided on use from Which? and other sources that means there are around a minimum of over 22 million wash cycles performed every single day in the UK alone.

There are, relationally speaking, very few failures that are catastrophic. In fact, a great many industries would be over the moon with numbers like that for safety.

We are not detracting from the serious nature of this at all in any way, simply putting some statistical perspective into the discussion.

Why Are Washing Machines Exploding?

In our opinion it’s really, really simple and down to one thing, cost.

If the failure was limited to one brand or one series of washing machines then it would be easy to say that it was a design flaw of some kind but, it isn’t as isolated as that. Therefore, logically, there has to be some sort of common reason and the only one that we can see is build quality, which is in large part driven by production cost.

Consumers and especially retailers demand cheaper and cheaper products and in order to achieve that manufacturers simply pander to the demand of the market and provide what it asks for. In order to do that and remain in business, they are pretty much forced to reduce the quality of the products as they have been for the past few decades.

We highlighted this some time ago with an article about what a washing machine should really cost here and, more recently highlighted just how much washing machine that you were actually buying in this article.

The bottom line is, they’re cheap and, with the constraints on how much can be spent building cheap washing machines, not high quality items.

And, whilst it might grate somewhat to say this, it is actually a testament to some of these low cost manufacturers that they do not have more failures like this.