Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Thanks Dave, its great to find that you are still on this forum! And the fix you suggested all those years ago was spot on. 🙂
Anyway, first I should apologise for posting to a general forum. I should of course have used the Washing Machines forum. Is there any way to move it to its rightful place?
Back to the PCB… I pulled out the PCB and with the benefit of better light and access I could see that about a dozen driver transistors had exploded too. I wish I could have seen it happen. It was starting to look like there might be something Very Wrong with this board. I tried to get hold of a service manual (or even just a circuit diagram) but have not been able to locate one with all the power of the Internet at my disposal. The best that the friendly lady at Miele UK could offer was a parts list with a diagram identifying the PCB. (As a PCB…) So much for the “Right to Repair” legislation. If there are any Miele service engineers in this group it would be great if one of them could post a part number for the manual! Even anonymously! Once upon a time I used to work in medical electronics and every single product I ever worked on had a service manual…happy days 🙂
Anyway, at risk of running out of clean clothes (combined with terrible drying weather), I decided to take the coward’s way out and ordered a new board from Miele. Which to their credit arrived on the promised day, (today). I now have to keep my fingers crossed that there isn’t something outside the board that caused the failure… or otherwise I am about to blow the best part of 200 quid finding out the hard way!
I’ll try to fit it tomorrow, and let you all know what happened next!
Goodnight,
AllanTheBrummie.
Thank you Dave, if ever you are in Birmingham I’ll buy you a beer. Hell, all the beer you can drink!
After refitting the trap, and reassembling the machine, everything is working again … for now anyway!
I’m still not quite clear what it was i did that made such a difference but i’m not complaining. And i’d never have worked out what to do without Dave’s help. We are going to introduce a regular washing machine cleaning routine, hoping that this will avoid the gunk buildup and preempt a recurrence… but I wont be too surprised if I’m back here again in a year’s time!
Thanks again,
Allan.
Hi Dave, thanks for the information.
(The following details will hopefully assist anyone who comes to this thread in future 🙂 )
The “bolt” is in fact the plastic pin with spherical head I mentioned in my very first post in this thread! To remove this I grabbed it in a pair of electrician’s pliers then gently pulled while rotating it 1/4 turn left/right/left/right… and eventually to my great relief it came free without snapping off. (What were Miele thinking? This should have been a stainless steel bolt with captive shakeproof washer. At the prices they charge this would not have hit the bottom line too hard 🙂 )
Anyway, with the pin removed it wasn’t too difficult to ease the trap from its rubber seal. The strut I mentioned before is not actually anything to do with supporting the drum as I’d previously suspected; it provides structural rigidity to the machine frame. It is welded in place, and is exactly where you would put it to stop someone getting the trap out. However, with patience there is just enough clearance to pull the trap out.
With decent access to the drum end of the trap, I was able to clear out some sludge with a pipe cleaner… In fact there must be some sort of maze within the trap because you cannot push a cleaner straight through! Using the syringe and one of the rubber hoses I’ve given it a very good flushing, and am now soaking it overnight in washing-up liquid solution. Tomorrow night I’ll clear the seal of Miele sealant gunge, reassemble. and let you know what happens!
Best wishes,
Allan
Wow, 10.25pm. That is so impressive…
Thanks again Dave, are you suggesting that the trap is just pushed into the outer drum and held in place only by the seal? Will i be able to get it past the strut which inconveniently sits right in front of it? (I imagined I might have to do some Very Serious Dismantling to get at it…) I’m very willing to learn, but as I said before this is all new to me!
Presumably if I can get the trap out I can clean it more thoroughly, but given that I can flush water through it via the pressure sensor hoses without any apparent problems I can’t help wondering if I am barking up the wrong tree… Be interesting to see how it works though!
Very best wishes,
Allan.
This is an old thread but almost exactly a year after the last time we had the “inlet fault” described above, the fault has recurred.
First, I can confirm that enough water gets into the machine before the error when I attempt to run a wash cycle for me to see that there was a bit of gunk suspended in the water I drained. However, I don’t think that it was excessive.
I’ve repeated the fix described above (actually much better prepared than last time; I’d got myself some long pipecleaners, a 200ml syringe from Amazon, and a gadget (an “NSDD Long Flexible Refrigerator Scrub Brush”) that I can only describe as like a very fine drain unblocker with a pipe cleaner instead of the spiral bit. With these I can guarantee that the two sections of rubber tube are completely clear, and I pushed and pulled the syringe enough times to flush the trap out (I would hope! – I probably spent about 10 minutes on this!) There were initially a few dark coloured specks in the water I pulled into the syringe but it very soon went clear.
In case it is relevant, the last wash before the failure ended up with the drum apparently completely full of bubbles…. small amount of washing with normal amount of detergent seems to trigger this 🙂
Any guesses or hints would be very welcome. Am I back to replacing the trap itself? (It seems that they are still available…) If so, any advice on how to do so would be very welcome.
Bordering on despair,
Best wishes and thank you for reading,
Allan.
Hi, just to update any followers of this thread… we’ve used the washing machine for a couple of weeks now and it is running perfectly! (Though I’ll probably be crossing my fingers throughout every fill cycle for a while yet…) Anyway, thanks Dave, your advice was excellent. (Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, I never did get to taste the gunk from the air trap. My gf wanted to do the sucking/blowing thing instead of me…)
