On May 31, 5:55*am, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:
The obvious solution to this problem is to buy laundry equipment with
conventional electro-mechanical controls. (Assuming they're still made.) My
GE washer and dryer are over 10 years old, and I expect them to last at
least another 15.

That's a good plan, but hard to implement.
When my washer last died, the problem was a riveted switch/relay
assembly that's no longer made; I was able to patch in a
relay in parallel with the defunct component, because the
schematic was printed on the box.

It wouldn't have been easy to trace the fault without the
schematic, and it would have taken a lot of remachining to
fix 'just like new'. The fault was with conventional controls that
were
mass-produced in complex assemblies.
My replacement relay was a tiny gold-plated aircraft/military
part, with four times the capacity of the original.

So, for repairability, you need
(1) conventional controls
(2) conventional (no surprises inside) components, preferably labeled
(3) documented functional blocks, so you can determine what function
failed.