A washer that finishes its cycle with water still in the drum has a drain problem, and a washer that will not spin usually has the same drain problem wearing a different hat. Machines will not spin a drum full of water, so the no-spin complaint and the no-drain complaint are frequently one fault.
The good news is that the most common cause is an obstruction rather than a failure, and you can check it yourself in ten minutes.
Check the filter first
Front-loaders have a drain pump filter behind a small hatch at the bottom front of the machine. Top-loaders vary — some have an accessible filter, some route everything through the pump.
Before you open it: put down towels and have a shallow tray ready. There is more water behind that cap than anyone expects, and it comes out fast.
What comes out of a filter is a decent history of the household. Coins, hair grips, buttons, screws, the underwire from a bra, a child's sock that went missing eighteen months ago. Any one of those will stop a pump dead while the pump itself is perfectly healthy.
If the filter was blocked, clear it, run a rinse-and-spin, and see whether the fault is gone. If it is, that was the whole job.
Then check the drain hose
Two things go wrong here and both are free to fix.
- •The hose is kinked behind the machine, usually because the washer was pushed back against the wall after someone pulled it out.
- •The hose is pushed too far down the standpipe. This one is subtle. If the end of the hose sits below the water level in the standpipe, the machine siphons — it drains continuously while it is trying to fill, and the symptoms look electronic. The hose should enter the standpipe far enough to stay put and no further.
The Chicago version of this problem
A great deal of the city's laundry sits in a basement, and a fair share of that basement laundry is shared between two or three units in a flat building. That changes the diagnosis in two specific ways.
First, the standpipe and the waste line are usually original. Cast-iron stacks with decades of scale inside them have a narrower bore than the day they went in, and a washer pumping into a partially restricted stack will fault on a full spin while passing a rinse cycle without complaint. The machine is fine. The building is the constraint.
Second, a shared machine leads a harder life than a household one. A washer serving three flats covers in two years the number of cycles a single household would put through it in ten. Pumps, drive couplers, door interlocks and suspension go first, and they go on a commercial schedule rather than a domestic one.
So before we condemn a pump on a flat-building call, we ask one free question: does the machine on the other side of the basement do the same thing, and does the utility sink drain normally? That answer separates an appliance fault from a building fault in about a minute.
What a technician checks that you cannot
- •The pump itself, for a seized impeller or a failed winding, as opposed to an obstruction in front of it.
- •The pressure switch and its hose, which is how the machine knows whether the drum is empty. A blocked pressure hose makes a perfectly good pump look broken.
- •The door or lid interlock, which has to prove closed before a spin will start. A failed interlock produces a no-spin with no drain fault at all.
- •The drive components — belt, coupler, motor — which are the genuine no-spin causes once draining is confirmed good.
- •The control board, last, because it is the least likely and the most expensive.
When to stop and call
Call if the filter was clean, the hose is straight and correctly positioned, and the machine still will not drain. Call immediately, without experimenting further, if you can smell burning, if the machine trips a breaker, or if water is appearing on the floor rather than staying in the drum — a leak on a basement floor is one thing, a leak in an upstairs unit is somebody else's ceiling.
Have the model number when you book. It is usually on the door frame of a front-loader or under the lid of a top-loader, and with it the technician can arrive with the likely parts already on the van.