A couple of weeks ago, I had to call a plumber thanks to the laundry backing up into the back bathroom. Here it is Christmas Eve as I get ready for lots of family to arrive from out of town, I had a problem with the washer. Mind you in the three years since this pup was installed, NEVER an issue at all. Now, I wondered if there was some jinx pertaining to water.
And no, there isn’t really an ag connection to the story, heck the washer didn’t even have cotton clothes in it cause I was running the cleaning cycle! And this isn’t a rant about how things always seem to go wrong when you don’t have time to get it handled or when you have to pay big overtime wages.
The post is actually about how easy it is to figure things out thanks to Google, YouTube, etc. Yep, this is another one of those times when social media saved my butt.
So the washer was on a cleaning cycle. That meant more than an hour of sanitizing hot water and steam. We had some clothes to wash and wanted to fit that in among the days events — final shopping trips including mega groceries, wrapping, cooking and cleaning. Lots to finish up! And when Alicia goes to put clothes in the washer, there is an error code. Great. My Whirlpool Duet Steam would do nothing but show F21. Couldn’t get it to do anything else.
I got out the laptop to see what the code meant (who organizes or uses manuals?) and found several websites that explained what it was. Fixya seemed that have a lot of people that had similar problems and been able to solve it in ways that sounded easy enough. But then another check of Google showed YouTube results. I watch a couple of those videos and we decided to see if it was as easy as everyone said. The two of us would try to do it alone – girl power!
Alicia volunteered to lay on the floor and pull out the screws. (I didn’t even need to ask. :)) Then she pulled off the cover and we turned off the power. The only change was that the videos we had seen were of a different model where it looked like we could have placed a very shallow pan to catch the water but on this model there wasn’t space so we had to soak all water up with a towel. Luckily there wasn’t a whole lot of water in ours, probably because our drain didn’t include all the socks other folks did! We just found some coins and a ballpoint pen.
Altogether, from getting the screwdriver to restarting the machine, it took something like 15 minutes. Without all the great folks sharing the simplicity of the fix, we’d have likely left it until we could get someone who knows something over and let dirty laundry stack up. Now we’ve gotten most of our chores done. And we did our very own video so we can show others how easy it was to fix it!
Now… I have to think… how many people search for things like washer codes or growing cotton, corn or soybeans!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE7NFBOFUjo]
Or critter treatments or recipes or…!