"Joel Kolstad" wrote:


"Pete Wilcox" wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.4.60.0704231458490.4081@squire...
Any weak solder joint in the "electronic" equivalent, subject to the
same mechanical forces, can produce an "intermittent" failure mode
that can be an absolute ******* to track down, and result in many
hours of fruitless investigation.

It just seems to me that with appropriate quality control and design
(including isolation mounting, etc.), you should be able to design a
washing machine controller board with an MTBF of, say, 100 years.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Electronically controlled washers are typiclaly a lot more water and
electiricity efficient than the old "fixed cycle" designs. This might
not rise to the level of "broken," (although Jim's leftist weenie
greenies would disagree :-) ) but it's close enough that newer
machines can be considered "valid" improvements, IMO.

---Joel

I have a Kenmore He3t front loader, which is identical internally to the
Whirlpool Neptune that was the subject of numerous class-action suits.

Despite having to redesign the drain mechanism to a gravity feed, I would
not trade this washer for a top load. It is so superior to a top load, I
won't even consider putting my clothes in one any more. The wash job is
fantastic.

When it detects an unbalanced load during spin, it has a neat algorithm to
spin at a low rpm which redistributes the load so it is balanced. When it
spins up, you often cannot tell there is anything in the drum, it is so
well balanced.

When it cannot balance the load, it spins anyway. The resulting vibration
shakes the floor and wakes up my neighbours, so I no can longer do laundry
at night.

I agree an intermittent connection can be a huge waste of time. But in this
case, if there were any weakness in the solder joints or connectors, they
would have fallen off long ago. So they must have pretty good quality
control to ship so many and have so few failures in the controller.

The forums are full of people taking about problems they are having with
these machines, and I can see how a lot of them can occur. But they seem to
have the connection problem solved.

Regards,

Mike Monett