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Re: AEG Lavamat 74530W stops during the program without erro
Raj55 wrote:Thanks for this post. I had exactly the same problem with my AEG oko lavamat washer after 13 years and followed your instruction. I have yet to test it. The circuit board was in exactly the same condition as yours. Cleaned it with circuit board cleaner fluid. Incidently the top cover in these machines are slided bacwards after removing the two screws at t he rear. I Will post a new message if it works on test.
what circuit board cleaner did you use?many thanks taffska.
Re: AEG Lavamat 74530W stops during the program without erro
Unfortunately, my solution was a temporary one. After two good days it started playing up again and I searched for the fault code and got heater element as the likely fault. That sealed the fate of the machine because it was not worth the cost since it was almost 13-15 years old (and the family was getting tired of my DIYing). Out it went and a new Siemens IQ500 came in its place and it has warranty for 5 years and motor waranty for 10 years. It is very quiet and runs great. Hopefully I am spared the problem for another ten years atleast. I am sorry, I have not had the time to upgrade this information in the original thread.
Raj.Re: AEG Lavamat 74530W stops during the program without erro
Hi all,
Yes, that was a bummer. I talked to Raij45 and he had the same experience as I did eventually. Alos my problem came back although it was after 6 months.
I don give up easy though so I kept looking for a solution and i think I FOUND IT! So keep reading!!!
So these are the steps I took to come to a solution. Pictures and movies you can find in my google drive folder:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id= … sp=sharing1) After the problem re-surfaced, I took the original advice of my friend (electronic wizard) and replaced the ELCO´s. Hoping that would do the trick. Unfortunately that did not make any difference (2.50 euro wasted 8)
2) During my test runs I thought I felt the water being kind of cold. I felt it through the plastic of the door. So I was starting to suspect the heater element. However, when I decided to do a test run on 95 degrees, it heated up fine!? I was confused.
3)I got back on the internet and looked for more information. I kept reading about the machine giving error messages. I even found all error code for AEG:
http://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk/help/fix- … codes.html
and
http://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk/help/faul … es-on.html
and the most detailed and helpful one:
http://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk/help/faul … codes.html
However, my machine never displayed ANY error codes, confused again!4) I kept searching and found out the machine has a test mode or troubleshoot mode. Aha, now I was interested. It took some more searching to figure out how to access it.
Press 2 buttons and turn the dial 1 position clockwise. See the movie on my Drive.5) So I turned the dial to 30 degrees and started heat up the water. The displayed number would hardly go up, only very slowly. It heated up to 21 degrees and then timed out and, Lord behold, there was an error message E61. Insufficient heating.
So I finally understood what was going on. The heating of the water took too long and when it did, the machine timed out and stopped. The blinking pause/start button meant actually that an error was encountered and the blinking frequency apparently meant E61!
4)So I decided to remove the heater element and test it by itself. See picture on my drive. I just plugged it into the mains directly and put it in a bucket of water. Ok, you need to know what you are doing otherwise you might electrocute yourself. So if you don´t feel comfortable doing this, don´t do it! Anyway, turns out the water started to warm up nice and quick. So the heater element was fine.
5)Next I had to figure out what was switching the heater element. One of these components was not working properly. In fact, I suspected a bas switch which had to much resistance since the heater element was doing a little but not enough.
I figured out by simply following the wiring that,between mains and the element there were 4 switches:
– Main dial
– A relay on the controller PCB
– The door contact
– The water level deviceAny of these switches could be the culprit. So my thinking was that a switch can wear out if it switches when there is power on it. The water level device, main dial and the door switch are just for safety and closed when the heater is switched on. However, the relay on the control PCB switches the heater on and off depending on the water temperature. So I looked there first.
6) Locating the relay on the PCB (see pictures on my Drive), I noticed that the inside of the transparent cover was all black. I removed the relay from the board with an soldering iron. Next removed the cover of the relay. The contacts were realy dirty. I cleaned everything, sanded the contacts with some fine sandpaper and made sure the two contacts were aligned nicely with enough distance between them when the relay was open. Closing the relay by hand showed the contacts were touching firmly and the metal was bending nicely when the contacts settled against each other. It looked good to me and I assembled everything back together and installed it on the PCB.
7) After putting the machine back together, a test run in service mode showed the temperature of the water was climbing up nicely at 1 degree every 2 or 3 seconds. Looked good!
8) Next I did some wash cycles succesfully. Now to determine if this really solved the issue, I need to wash a lot. Funny part is however, that finding all of this out took some time. My family got impatient and a new Bosch washing machine came in. So, the repaired AEG is going to move to my oldest daughter and have a second life there. I will let you know if washing keeps going OK.
As an afterthought I wondered why my cleaning job on the PCB was able to postpone the problem for almost 6 months. My guess is that the carbon residu was indeed influencing the power on the PCB. Not much but enough to make the relay close less powerfull. So when I cleaned the PCB, the relay closed better (more force on the contacts) and heating the water worked good enough to avoid any time outs. In time the contact point deteriorated further until the problem was so severe that every washcycle ended in a time out.
So there you go, all turned out to be normal wear of an electro-mechanical component. No money spend in repairing it, just a lot (!) of time. I must say, better information on the error codes and the troubleshoot mode would have made the whole proces a lot easier and faster. A lot! So hopefully this post will inspire and help others.
If I have some time, I will add my home made electrical diagram of the heater and connected switches to the drive.
Cheers!
Re: AEG Lavamat 74530W stops during the program without erro
Fascinating reading though it was shouting PCB fault from the start (as I stated in my response to your original post). I’m pleased you sorted it albeit adopting a very dangerously unsafe testing technique. Do please spare us from posting your DIY wiring diagram though. (Against forum rules) 😀
Re: AEG Lavamat 74530W stops during the program without erro
And also never wire up a heating element directly, at least connect an earth connection to it.
Re: AEG Lavamat 74530W stops during the program without erro
Hi Martin,
Glad I entertained you. 😀
You were right, exchanging the control PCB would have solved the problem. But also would have been costly.
The part that really got me forward was the test mode and realizing the water was not heating fast enough. Now I was able to pinpoint components on the control board and check them.
And yes, testing the heater that way was a little crude. I took some measures though by isolating my grip on the heater and my house is equipped with a ground fault circuit breaker.
Why is posting the wiring diagram against forum policies?
Anyone interested can contact me directly.
Re: AEG Lavamat 74530W stops during the program without erro
fixitall wrote:Why is posting the wiring diagram against forum policies?
Not entirely sure, it’s just that they were ‘set in tablets of stone’ and brought down from Mount Whitegoods more the 10 yrs ago by a wise old bearded gentleman. 😉
Re: AEG Lavamat 74530W stops during the program without erro
Just to add a further candidate solution for control board fixes after random cycle stops.
We have an AEG Lavamat 1250 (914 002 4259 00) which developed a increasingly frequent habit of randomly stopping mid cycle. Washing was always ok, but often quitting in rinse / early in spin… Until it always stopped.. with much like symptoms others have seen here.
Error code 52 initially but through various testing, also 33, 11, 51 appeared. I discovered the control board can also seem to “lock-up” showing no error code. From previous knowledge of embedded systems, this suggested to me the micro-controller may have an unstable power supply. I did waste lots of time on other checks before focussing on the control board though.
So, in addition to the black dust (agree with earlier post it’s probably ferrous motor brush dust) around the transformer area of the PCB and big resistor, I discovered multiple microscopically fractured solder joints on many of the power related components. All the power stuff is at the control knob end of the PCB / bigger components – that is, not the little (SMT) dots and chips. Note that these radial solder joint fractures are only visible with a LOT of magnification under strong light.
Having checked all the non-SMT / power components joints and re-soldered everything that was looking fractured (probably 10 joints), the machine works 100{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} reliably again. I hope this helps others save the cost of an expensive control board. This solution should be under an hour’s work and costs zero (if you have an electronics soldering iron of course).
My theory is that the bigger components are heavier than the tiny SMT ones and the vibration of spin fatigues the joints over a few years. This is very likely to make the power supply to the “brains’ progressively unstable and so increasingly likely to lockup the micro-controller (that is, the whole control board / wash cycle). It could also explain why gentle motion of washing is not enough to destabilise the “brains” on-board power but rinse and spin vibration will fairly quickly.A final suggestion / tip re the electrolytic capacitors (little can shaped items) which were mentioned earlier as candidate causes. These are very often the first items to fail in ALL old power supplies as the innards “dry out”. If the very top of the can bows upward, like there is pressure inside, it a sure sign that that capacitor is dead and must be replaced.
Re: AEG Lavamat 74530W stops during the program without erro
Many thanks for the useful tips and comments. My Lavamat 74630 Update is now running again following the cleaning procedure to the main PCB, however if I had read to the end of the posts I would have realized I should have cleaned the relay contacts as well so I anticipate the same problem to reoccur sometime in the future, but heyho, for now AOK after several washes. I would add that on my model the PCB housing is fixed vertically to the right hand side panel adjacent to the rotary switch.
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