Let's talk about washing machines... (again...)

Dear Indesit/Whirlpool,

I think it would be fair to say I don't have much luck when it comes to washing machines. If you've not been with me on my previous adventures into the land of soapy water, have a read here of what's happened before.

For those of you who aren't washing machine aficionados (why wouldn't you be?!) you may not know that there are only really a few brands who manufacture these machines, they are then rebadged with different company names and sold. For example, Whirlpool own Hotpoint and Indesit - they come from the same factory, share the same parts and generally just have different bits of plastic on the front to differentiate the brands.

Why is it relevant who owns each brand? Well, after the fun I had with AEG last time, I did my homework and went for a brand that really was different to try and avoid the quality control issues that had plagued me previously. Sadly, however, I managed to go from a brand with a reputation for poor build quality, to one with a reputation for burning down houses.

Oh.

We are really, really, really sorry for burning down your houses.

"Not to worry!" I thought. Surely, a global brand who have very publicly just had to recall a lot of machines and pay a lot of compensation to people with rather blacker homes than they'd perhaps like, would have introduced some seriously stringent checks on their production lines and made changes to ensure things like this never happen again. They have a reputation to rebuild!

I even joked about it at the time. "What better time to buy one than after a bit of a scandal!"

Yeah. About that....

So roll forwards 18 months after purchasing a new Indesit washing machine and I'm stood in the kitchen when "POP! POP! POP! WHiiiirrrrr........"

"That's not a healthy noise for a washing machine to make."

Now, it may surprise you (it won't), but being the saddo that I am, I'm quite into electronics and repair/right to repair so I knew enough straight away to know that those noises were electrical and something had very much just met its maker inside the machine. A few seconds later and the smell of smouldering electrics fills the air. Time to whip the machine out.

About that promise not to burn houses down any more....

A picture does indeed tell a story. In the image above you can deduce exactly what's happened and why. The result is not good for a company which has promised it no longer makes incendiary washing machines.

For those of you struggling, here's the trail of clues:

• Look at the wires on the top left. There's a clip hanging in mid air - this clip should go in the hole nearby, only it never was in there. How do I know? Because it was tied down so tightly that it didn't move up or down on the wiring loom, and it was too far up the loom to have ever been clipped in. This, is what we could term, "a bit of a mistake." Or as I prefer to call it "a house fire waiting to happen."
  
• Move down and you'll see the big black marks where things have shorted together which shouldn't have. What happened? Well, the wires that weren't tied down were free to sit on top of the beige couloured thing which happens to be a transformer. The transformer is covered in tape to protect it because you don't want to touch the wires on a transformer when it's plugged in and switched on...
  
• Over time, and since the machine was built, those wires have been slowly rubbing themselves on top of the transformer every time the machine spins up and vibrates. Eventually (it took 18 months) they rubbed one of the wires apart, causing a short which promptly caused the transformer to have a bit of a panic and go pop.
  

This machine, then, was quite literally a time bomb from the moment it left the factory. It also highlights a few really annoying things.

• Due to poor quality control (again, who'd have thought it?!) and an oversight/laziness of the person putting it together, this could well have been yet another house burned down in a totally avoidable situation. There's no margin for interpretation here. Appliances, sadly, cause hundreds of house fires from incorrect manufacture and install each year and for this reason, they're designed not to set on fire. A crazy concept, I know. This is *yet another* example of what happens when safety protocols are ignored or people simply decide not to do their job properly. Safety rules are often annoying and slow us down, but they are there for this exact reason - that one time you don't do something you're supposed to, things go wrong in a way you didn't expect and then you're potentially killing people.
  
• Right to repair. This would not be a difficult repair job. At best I'd have to splice the wire back together, replace the transformer and maybe any fuse arrangement where the mains connects to the machine. As you can see from the picture, this requires very few tools and very little technical competence to achieve. However, manufacturers have genuinely argued that consumers repairing things like this would be dangerous. More dangerous than the manufacturer themselves doing a good job of trying to burn my house down in the first place?!
  

So, I did indeed look into repairing it, only to find that the parts I would need are on sale, from specialist outlets, if you're lucky... for the price of a new machine. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why there is a long, long way to go before we actually tell the truth about the situation and that's that the lobbying power of large multinationals has meant that we cannot get affordable parts, we cannot fix things ourselves and we will continue to make a never ending mountain of waste because companies are more than aware that if we start fixing things then we will stop buying new things and that, as they say on the trading floors of stock markets across the world is "a bad thing."

That is why I had to buy a new machine. Well, that and the fact it was stolen from outside my house within 3 minutes of taking it out...