Not spinning an unbalanced? load

[andyr12345]

Had a lot of Hotpoint's over the years and they have normally shared the same feature that if when it comes to Spin cycle if the clothes are not distributed the machine will not spin the clothes - the drum will deliberate , slow tumbling back and forth until it balances, (or attempts to balance) the load .. if it cant , then thats it with a Hotpoint its a no go, it wont go into a spin .. the cycle just ends and your clothes come out nearly sopping wet - it must be a nightmare for engineers or hotpoint who phone up hotpoint complaining their machines are 'faulty' and not spinning (even if they have written it into the instructions booklet for the machine) - are hotpoint machines the only ones to have this 'built in feature' that if the load is not balanced it simply will not spin? - or do other manufacturers employ this I wonder?

I just watched a Hoover washing machine on youtube spinning where it went into spin even though it was terribly unbalanced. - it is a bit annoying sometimes when the hotpoints do this mucking about 'will they, wont they spin?' thing but I suppose not only would the machine be a hell of a lot noisier on spin than it should be it must put more fatigue on things like the suspension and springs and other components of the machine if it were to spin unbalanced, so I suppose the lesser of 2 evils is that it comes out wet after going into a no-spin mode. Hotpoint/indesit though (on their LCD panels) should throw up an error code on the display I reckon if they cannot go into spin mode because of non-balanced situation so at least at the end of the wash it will give the user an indication that the stuff never spun.. but mid you I suppose you soon know hen you take them out and they are still wet and that you may have to re-distribute them or add something else into the drum to balance it. 

Re- spinning and the direction of spinning. Some machines still spin in a clockwise direction but a lot of the washing machines on spin cycle spin anti-clockwise ... now I am in no way a scientist or physicist or whatever and not an expert on centrifugal force .. but having a think about this would clothes come out dryer after a spin on a machine that has an anti-clockwise spin because if its spinning anticlockwise then the water would push outwards with force wouldnt it? - if going in a clockwise direction as its spinning then to water would be going into the middle of the direction of the drum wouldnt it? - or is it the way that centrifugal force works that the water always spins away from the clothes no matter what direction the drum is spinning in? 

 

[Whitegoodshelp (Andy)]

As far as I'm aware all modern washing machines now have out of balance protection. It can cause a lot of problems, especially with large capacity drums. As we've discussed in previous topics many people do not adequately fill the large capacity drums. So they can sometimes struggle to balance a small load, especially if it contains one or more heavy items amongst lighter ones.

It was a surprisingly long time before someone thought up the out of balance protection. Hotpoint were the first that I came across in the 80s. They had a very crude system. Small microswitches attached to the suspension. If the load was badly out of balance and the drum must thumping about the microswitch would get triggered and cut the power to the motor. It was effective in preventing prolonged serious out of balance spins. But it couldn't stop the out of balanced load from spinning or the first several thumps against the casing. However it was a precursor to the more sophisticated systems now in use.

Unfortunately many of the out of balance systems are still relatively crude in the sense that they can prevent loads from spinning that would be okay. They are often set too much on the safe side, especially the cheaper budget machines. With the budget machines in particular are serious out of balance spin could completely wreck the machine because they and built well enough. So they tend to just have a very simple but strict system. I've written at length about this issue, particularly the problem of it not spinning some loads in my article here - Washing machine won’t spin just one item or very small load

Washing machines usually spin in a clockwise direction. I would think that no matter which direction once spun in the laundry is evenly forced around all of the drum and water should be expressed relatively evenly throughout all of the holes in the drum. The water should then just run into the bottom of the drum through to the pump.

[andyr12345]

ah yes I have had one of these Hotpoints with the microswitches on the shock absorbers like you mention. It was a pretty high end hotpoint with an (unlit) LCD display and electronic timer. 

My present hotpoint (and i suppose more would be like this) is annoying if you select a separate spin cycle (even if you do have a nearyl full drum with mixture of small and larger items) - when you set it 1400rpm it starts the time on the LED Display as something like 14minutes but mucks about balancing and spinning doesnt really get under way until at 8mins left. All that mucking about when it could have had a nice long spin for near on 14minutes at full spin. It does this nearly every time so I suppose its a design rather than a fault, as in if you could imagine in the software/firmware of the chip on the main controller board being programmed to not spin properly until the timer gets to 8mins! - not only that but its even worse on a quick wash, it only starts spinning full speed at 4 minutes then stops spinning at 2mins and then sits there and then at 1 minute pumps out the water so thats even less time spinning.

  

[Whitegoodshelp (Andy)]

Yes I've often been puzzled as to why washing machine sometimes just seem to faff about instead of getting on with it. Back in the day the old Hoover washing machines had just a two-minute distribution cycle before spin. Then it fired up into fast spin no matter how badly the load was balanced. Over the years I came across many washing machines that had virtually destroyed themselves and their surroundings when they had been left to run alone. A seriously bad load had entered spin and the tub was violently thumping around inside. The washing machine was virtually leaving the floor and was banging around like crazy. There was nothing to stop it unless it damaged something that cut the power somehow. I've seen the suspension rods on Hoover washing machines make a hole in the floor boards underneath. It really is hard to believe that no one thought of trying to do anything to prevent it.

If your washing machine sets an estimated time of 14 minutes for the final spin then clearly it's designed to take that amount of time for some reason. It must be lazy programming for me. They obviously need to allow a minute or so for all the water to get pumped away but once the water has gone it should door the fast spin as soon as the load is adequately balanced. It sounds like it's just allowing loads of time for all possibilities such as water draining much slower and a load being difficult to balance instead of adequately monitoring these things and getting on with spin as soon as everything is okay.

 

[andyr12345]

one washing machine I had years ago started spinning even when the drum had water inside, it didnt even wait until the water had drained out.. oh no as soon as the dial got to the spin mark that was it , it revved up no balancing, no care whether it had water still left in the drum or not , off it went spinning. Now I realise maybe there must have been something up with the water level switch or something , it still worked but yeah with no balancing that one would violently bang about when it was spinning every now and again.

[Whitegoodshelp (Andy)]

Could be, although some Hoover washing machines used to do that on purpose. They called it a spin burst or something. I remember it being introduced in the 90s I think. The idea was to do a controlled  spin on wash to force the detergent through the laundry, and on rinses to aid rinsing by forcing water through the laundry. It didn't seem to catch on or last.