The front loader door that will not open, and the one thing you must not do to it
A fellow in Corrimal rang me about a locked washing machine door and, while I was still on the phone with him, I heard it go. A crack, then a quieter clunk, then a long pause. He had one hand on the handle and one on the phone, and he had been giving it a bit more each time I asked him a question.
That was a forty dollar door lock turning into a handle, a catch and a door lock. Same machine, same visit, three times the parts.
I have been at this for twenty-five years and I would say a door that will not open is the call I most wish people would make before they touch anything. Not because it is hard. Because it is nearly always nothing, and the damage all happens in the two minutes before they ring.
A locked door is usually a machine doing what it was told
Every front loader has a lock on the door, and the lock has one job: keep the door shut while there is water or heat inside. On most machines it is a small block with a plastic bimetal strip in it, and when the cycle finishes that strip has to cool down before the pin lets go. That takes a minute or two. On some it is closer to three.
So the first thing is the dullest thing. Wait. Turn the machine off at the panel, count to a hundred and twenty, and try the handle gently. Do not try it hard. A handle on a modern front loader is a bit of plastic on a pivot with a plastic hook behind it, and if the pin is still in, pulling harder just bends the hook until it snaps.
If it opens after the wait, there is no fault. That is the lock working.
If it is still shut, there is water in it
This is the one that catches most people, and it is nearly all of the calls.
A front loader will not release the door while the drum has water in it, and it does not care why the water is there. Cycle interrupted by a blackout. Somebody hit cancel halfway. Drain pump filter blocked with a hair clip and a fifty cent piece and the machine gave up waiting. Any of those and you have a drum with ten litres in it and a lock that is holding, correctly, so you do not get ten litres across the laundry floor.
Look through the glass. If you can see water sitting in the bottom of the drum, or the washing is sodden and lying in a heap rather than stuck to the sides, that is your answer, and no amount of handle work is going to change it.
What changes it is getting the water out. Run a drain-and-spin, or a rinse-and-spin if the panel has one, and give it the full cycle. If the pump runs and the water goes, the door will pop when it finishes. If the pump hums and nothing goes, or the machine throws a drain code, the pump filter is blocked, and I have already written out the whole drain pump filter routine so I will not repeat it here. Short version: towel, shallow tray, open the flap at the bottom front, unscrew the filter slowly, let it drain. Then the door will open.
There is also a manual release, and this is the bit that is worth knowing before you ever need it. Behind that same filter flap, on nearly every front loader I see, there is a little tab or a loop of cord beside the filter. Pull the tab down, or pull the cord, and the lock pin retracts. It is there for exactly this situation. Drain first, though. The release does not know whether the drum is full, and it will happily give you the ten litres.
The door that opens, but the machine will not start
Same part, opposite complaint, and I get about as many of these.
The door lock also tells the control board that the door is shut. If that signal never arrives, the machine sits there with the door light flashing, or beeps at you, or starts to fill and then stops. The door feels closed. The hook has gone in. The lock has not registered it.
Two things do this. Either the hook on the door is not reaching the lock any more, which is usually a worn hinge letting the door sag a few millimetres, or the lock itself has failed inside. You can sometimes tell which: lift the door slightly by the handle as you push it shut, and if it starts on the lift, it is the hinge or the catch. If it does not matter what you do, it is the lock.
Either way this is a real fault rather than a full drum, and it is a cheap one. A door lock is a small generic part on most brands, it sits behind the door seal at the two o'clock position, and it comes out with two screws and a bit of patience with the seal spring. A sagged hinge is a hinge and a couple of bushes. Neither is a reason to think about a new machine.
The handle broke. Now what
If you did pull, and it went, the door is now shut with a lock still engaged and no handle to work it.
Drain the machine through the pump filter, then use the manual release tab I described above. The door will open. Then leave it open, because with the handle gone, the next time it shuts you are back where you started.
A handle is not expensive. The catch that the handle pulls is not expensive. What is expensive is a door where the plastic frame around the glass has cracked, because on a lot of models the handle, the catch and the door front are one moulded assembly, and then you are buying a door. That is the point where a ten year old machine gets a hard look. I would still usually fix it, but it is closer.
The one where the door is stuck and the machine is dead
Different problem, and worth a paragraph because the fix is not in the laundry.
If the machine has gone completely dark, no lights, no beeps, nothing, and the door is locked, the door is locked because the machine lost power partway through and the lock happened to be engaged when it did. Check the power point with a lamp. Check the switchboard. If the safety switch has tripped and it trips again the moment you reset it with the washer plugged in, unplug the washer and leave it unplugged. A dead machine that trips the board is a heater or a motor going to earth, and that is a technician job, not a try-again job.
And if the point itself is dead and the board looks fine, that is house wiring, and in NSW any electrical wiring work needs a licensed electrician, regardless of the cost or type of work. Do not let anyone talk you into a quick look inside the wall.
What I would and would not pay for
A door lock, a handle, a catch, a hinge. All cheap, all quick, all worth doing on any machine that is otherwise fine.
What I would not pay for is a repeat. If the door has locked on a full drum three times in a year, the door was never the problem, the draining was, and that is a pump filter that needs clearing every couple of months in a house with long hair and school socks, or a drain pump that is on its way out. Fix the draining and the door will look after itself.
The other thing worth thirty seconds before you spend anything is the model number and the national product recalls register. There are over eight thousand recalls listed on it now, and a handful of washer models are among them. A recalled machine gets sorted by the manufacturer at no cost to you, and I would rather you found that out before I did.
Booking a repair
We repair front and top loading washing machines across Wollongong, the Illawarra and the South Coast. A door lock, a handle or a hinge is one of the quicker jobs we do, and it is nearly always done on the first visit because the parts are common.
We are an independent family-owned repairer and not the authorised agent for any brand, so if the machine is still inside its manufacturer warranty, ring the manufacturer first. Out of warranty, the assessment fee is $125 across the Illawarra and $145 further out on the South Coast, and you get the repair price before any work starts. Book a repair or call 02 4229 3777.
If the door is shut right now and there is water in the drum, put the phone down, open the filter flap, and find the tab. Then ring me if you still need to.
