Friday 7 December 2007

Somebody got paid to design this?

My partner and I have a new washing machine. It happened in a rush, courtesy of the old one breaking, and cleaned out my finances quite nicely so that I could save a couple of hundred dollars by paying cash (and shopping around served me very nicely, thank you) and not have to pay off another interest-incurring loan.

It is, because you'd be mad not to miss the opportunity, a dual washer/dryer. And it's marvellous. Put clothes in, press buttons, come back six hours later and they're clean and dry.

But...

It's a front-loader, which it has to be to be a dryer as well, but one consequence of this is that it can't have a conventional, nice little accessible lint filter.

In fact, it doesn't have a lint filter. At all. Which surprised me a bit.

So now, instead of a small cloth bag that catches fluff and hair and rubbish like that and which gets emptied every other wash, it all gets flushed out with the dirty water. Or rather, doesn't get entirely flushed out with the dirty water because most of it collects in the drain hole of the sink you're draining into, building up until it clogs, and you come down and find that the sink is full of grotty water into which you must plunge your hand in order to fish out wet, slimy tangles of lint which would have been nice and compact if it had been in a filter, but which instead is partly foul and disgusting and partly escaped down the drain to clog up the works further down-stream and become even more foul and disgusting.

But wait, there's more. It gets even better.

There is a lint trap, in case there are buttons or coins or bits of bra strap rattling around inside, and this gets clogged with lint as well. And because this is an integral part of the waterworks inside the machine, when it gets clogged the machine stops working, which you find out when you go downstairs in the morning to fetch the clothes you put on last night and which aren't dry at all, but are sitting there still wet with the machine flashing "SE" at you on the display, leaving you with nothing to wear.

But wait, it gets even better. You see, in order to clear this lint trap you first have to get down on your knees and lever off a small plastic panel that is clipped on in a way that requires you to try and insert something thin into the gap, swear because it's too weak to lever off the panel, insert something sturdier, swear because it won't quite fit, and then just apply brute force. Our panel was removed entirely, and will not be replaced.

You then have two caps, one small and one large. The small one, it turns out, covers a drain tube. You see, because the lint filter is at the bottom of the machine, any water still inside will come gushing out when you remove said filter, so there's a drain tube which you can pull out to drain neatly into a bowel. Or you could, if you could get enough grip on the little plastic end cap to pull it out once you've turned it to the release position, which you can't, so you need to use pliers.

Fuck that. Our washing machine is sitting on a concrete floor under the house: Water can go everywhere, I really don't care.

So I just unscrew the big cap, which is the lint trap. Which, when removed, turns out to be have been blocked by less lint than you can pull out of your trouser pockets when they're fresh out of the wash.

Somebody got paid to design this?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Return it there must be a clause in there some where that if you are not satisfied then they have to do some thing about it

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