Not Always Right Do not wash your bowling ball!
Many MANY years ago when I was in college, I visited a buddy of mine at his campus. As we bombed around doing nothing a looking at the local town, he showed me one of their forms of entertainment at the laundromat they used. He put a dime (that will tell you how long ago it was) into the machine and then opened the door and got in and told me to close the door. And bracing himself against the drum with hands and feet, he took a number of trips around before it got too warm and he pushed the door open and stopped the action. Now, back then, we really knew how to have fun.
I used to have an Asko W/D set from model year ~2000. They’re Swedish. They’re compact machines with a small diameter drum. When that thing spun up it sounded like a turbofan; a great high pitched whine that just kept getting higher and higher pitched. Near the end of the spin-up wife or I would comment “We have lift-off!”
I have no use for “smart home” products. Piss me right off. But I have to admit that I’d buy a washer that had a feature where when something got bolixed up my phone would ring and a patronizingly calm and soothing voice would say “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. …” Bonus points if I could program it to use my name rather than just “Dave”.
I’d get the vid cite all cued up for y’all right here, but as we know Discourse isn’t exactly helping with this today. Kinda like HAL sometimes.
I have a Siri shortcut on my phone that opens the garage door when I say
“Open the pod bay doors, Hal."
When I was an undergrad, I had a classmate who was actually named Dave. We were working on a research project for one of the professors, who also happened to be the sysadmin for all of the department’s workstations. When my classmate finally finished his big data-analysis program and hit the button to start it, the prof was watching from across the room, and made his computer play the “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that” soundclip.
Washers have to pull all those G’s to get the blackout…of you clothes
I read somewhere that front load washers have a spin cycle that is about 33% faster than a top loader.
The oft cited 1,200 rpm is 25% lower than the 1,600 rpm of my front loader so getting in that ballpark.
Not sure there is any truth to that though.
That’s exactly what older top loaders had. Just a metal tab that hung down close to the outside of the drum housing. One momentary touch and the machine stopped. Apparently they no longer do this.
Here is an epic failure!!!
It made the machines last longer. They had to do away with that deal. I assume that helped our old stacked washer/dryer develop a leak in the tub seal. So I just had to spend over 1-1/2 gs for a new machine, and that was the cheap one.
Just put it on air dry!
There’s a remarkably low-tech similar device on a 737 to prevent retracting a damaged tire or runaway unbraked wheel into the wheelwell. Any flailing motion outside the desired envelope at the edge of the well snaps off a short stub of hydraulic tubing, dumping the pressure side of the retract mechanism to the outside world. Then the gear leg gravity free-falls back to extended, and can’t be retracted until the snapped tubing is replaced on the ground. Cheap, simple, and as reliable as, well, dirt.
So was that about like the one in your kitchen started to do? Good thing you got to the circuit breaker early. 
I love that vid.
When the machine spit the mobo out early on the couple of feet of umbilical that was an inspired bit of random improv that greatly extended the show. I bare my entrails to thee! Then later while the drum was chasing around the yard dragging the mobo behind like a dog fleeing its tail it was total comedy gold. Then when the drum got wrapped up in the obstacles you knew it was just a matter of time until it stomped on its own mobo and killed itself. The suspense was incredible until it finally climaxed exactly as predicted.
An entire 3-act play written and performed ad lib by pure chaotic out of balance gyrations.
I think it’s safe to say that was probably the washer excursion that launched a thousand pale imitations.
Mine has WiFi. Basically completely worthless. Having WiFi on it absolutely was not on my list of things I wanted in a washer/dryer. But, I live in a single-floor condo and the W/D is never far away. I don’t need it to tell me things are done. My sister, on the other hand, has a multi-floor home (two stories and a basement). Having the machine ping her phone when a cycle is done is worthwhile to her so she does not need to run up and down stairs to check. Even so I’d say it’s not of much use (just set a timer on your phone when you start a load).
Fortunately, my washer is pretty good about clearing an unbalanced load. Partly helped that it is a front loader it can get gravity working for it. If it detects an unbalanced load it stops spinning, then does a few minor rotations slowly and lets clothes fall down. Then it tries spinning fast again. If still unbalanced it has another try at clearing it. Not sure how often it will work to fix this but eventually it gives up. I’ve only had that happen twice in three years and was sorted easily enough.
It is that kind of smart operation I want and not WiFi.
OK, that wasn’t a real-world washing machine destroying itself. That was a Muppets skit of a washing machine destroying itself. For @LSLGuy , it might have been the loose motherboard that did it, but for me, it was when it drew a sword.
While waving its open door in front of its vulnerable core like a shield. I’d missed that symbolism the first time. Thank you!
Shouldn’t that be 9.81 m/s^2, not 9.81 m/s^-3?
Quite right. I was having so much “fun” fussing with the formatting I screwed up the exponent. Good eyes, Good Sir!
It’s interesting to me that your quote of my post fouled up the formatting. Not that you did something wrong, just that something somewhere went wrong.
I suspect that it’s more energy efficient to run an electric motor and spin the drum faster for longer, in order to expel more water, than it is to run the dryer in order to remove the same amount of water.
That’s the tradeoff that I’d be willing to bet the washer manufacturers are making.
If you have the sound turned up you can hear it is still running, it just threw the belt to the drum. To quote Jerry Seinfeld, “That is one tough cookie!”
yeah, the thing went on about three minutes longer than I expected. Once it started throwing off pieces left and right I figured it would break down at any moment.
I wonder what Whirlpool thought of the video. This would make a great ad for them wouldn’t it?
P.S. Did anyone else think that when the door opened that it was coming to get the Ozzie guy? 