I know absolutely nothing about machines and appliances of any kind, so I apologize if there is a blatantly obvious answer to my question, but: I own a Frigidaire top loading washer/dryer unit, and while I was doing laundry earlier, I was a dumbass, loaded it up with a bunch of towels, and then ran it with “low” water instead of “med” or “high”. :smack:
In any event, during the spin cycle it started making that loud banging noise that I assume means the drum is unbalanced, so I stopped it mid-load and moved a bunch of stuff around so that it was balanced more evenly. It than ran for a few more minutes before it just came to a halt. No noise, no explosions, the whole thing just became unresponsive.
Being the extremely lazy person that I am, I just said to myself “Maybe if we ignore the problem, it’ll go away on its own”. Sure enough, after unloading about half of the weight and waiting around for 30-40 minutes, when I tried to start the washer again it spontaneously started up.
It seems to be running smoothly now, but I’m curious: am I ignoring an existing problem that could crap things up in the future, or do I just need to do the wash in more moderate loads?
You should try Frigidaire’s web site for customer support to see if they discuss this behavior; especially check your owner’s manual or look for one online if you don’t have it. My guess is that the machine disabled itself temporarily because it has a switch inside that temporarily disables it if it’s wildly unbalanced or overheats or something.
A washing machine should be able to easily handle a full load of towels if not overloaded. With the water on High, if all the towels are submerged during the wash cycle then all should be fine.
The fact that you ran it with the water too low should not have caused any problem at all with the washer, although your towels probably wouldn’t get as clean as they should.
I wonder…if the towels at the top didn’t get wet, they wouldn’t stick to the drum during the spin cycle. This could cause them to ball up or tangle around the auger. At least that’s all I can think of.
A couple of years ago, I overloaded my Kenmore washer and it started banging around and then just completely died. The washer was full of water and wet clothes and nothing I did got any response.
I removed all of the heavy wet clothes from the washer, making a huge mess, expecting to have to go to a laundromat and then call a repairman.
When I was done, I pushed the start switch and it started right back up.
I guess there’s some sort of safety switch that shuts the whole thing down during an overload, or maybe even a time delay to keep from burning up the motor.
The motor windings have a thermal circuit breaker on them to prevent an overload from burning them out. Once the windings cool down below the TCB’s reset point, the motor will run again.
