Fixing the Washer

Yesterday I was washing a load of laundry when I noticed a river of water flowing from under the door of my mud room where the washer is housed.  Wonderful.  I opened the door and saw that the water was cascading from beneath the washing machine.  Luckily, it was in the final spin and drain cycle, so I only had to wait a couple minutes for the water to stop.  I grabbed a couple towels and sat down in front of the computer for a seemingly endless search on how to solve the problem.

If you have an HE machine and this has happened to you, I hope you will benefit from this post.  I know I saved at least $300 by fixing the problem myself, AND I had my washer up and working the very same day.  My leak was coming from the front of the machine.  If yours is coming from the back, this post probably won't be much help.

I have a Whirlpool Duet Sport frontloading HE washer.

The first thing I did was unplug the washer.  That's vital whenever you're working on an appliance because you don't want to get electrocuted, right?  Next, I removed the kick plate on the front of the machine.  I used a socket wrench to get the bolts off.  They are located on the bottom of the machine and there are 3 total.  You don't have to lift the machine or put blocks under it or any of that if you have a screwdriver that is thin enough.

Here's what it looks like (I've circled the location of the bolts holding on the kick plate in red. You will probably need to lay on the ground to see them):

Once you get the kick plate off, your machine will look like this:

See where that hand is grabbing?  That's the drain filter.  Put a bowl or something underneath it and slowly unscrew it (counterclockwise).  Mine was on there ridiculously tight because it was the first time I'd undone it.  Holy cow it was hard to get off, but luckily taking it off slowly allowed me to just "turn off" the water when my bowl got full so I could empty it out.

When it comes out, you'll have something like this, except yours will be dirty and it will probably have a bunch of stuff sitting in it like coins, screws, etc.:

Clean that puppy out.  It's the drain filter, so it's probably a good thing to know its location and how to access it anyway.  Once that's done, shine a flashlight around in the area that it goes to make sure there's nothing else in there.  I had a baby sock stuck in the drain tube on my machine.

Put the filter back in.  Also, if your machine isn't draining at all, you probably need to replace the entire pump assembly (the part that the filter is attached to), but luckily because of it's location that's an easy fix.  Order the part online and it's just 2 clamps and a plug-in electrical connection to install/uninstall it.  You can totally handle the job on your own.

After I fixed up the filter, I ran a load of clothes sans kick plate.  Not recommended and probably dangerous, however in my case it revealed that my leak was not fixed yet.  I also saw the water was coming from the seal around the door of the machine where it joined up with the tub.

I googled a YouTube video of how to fix it and everything said I would need a new one if there was any leak at all.  I called Whirlpool to get a price... $150.  No.  Amazon had one for $60.  Score.  So before I attempted the repair on my own, I decided to see if I could get the old "boot" off.  Fail... that process is so dang complicated and it involves taking the entire top and front panel off of the machine.  That wasn't going to happen since my machines were stacked, so I decided to look for a suspicious part I saw in the video.

To do this, I released the spring clamp/wire around the front of the door seal.  Just use a screwdriver and pry the spring (at the bottom) away from the machine.  The rest of the wire will pop right off.  Now you can disconnect the seal from the door opening, so do that and clean all around the inside of it.  Push it inside your washing machine and you will have access to the space near the drum.  I don't have any pictures of this because I was too busy to take photos and it's not a "normal" procedure, so there aren't any photos online either.

Next, I used a makeup mirror and a flashlight to locate the screw of the clamp that attaches the "boot" to the drum of the machine.  For me, it was on the left side around 10 o'clock. I found a small phillips head screwdriver and used it to tighten the screw on the clamp by 1.5 turns.  Then I went to work reseating the "boot" around the door opening and getting the spring-loaded clamp/wire back in place.  I closed the door and ran another load of laundry (with the kick plate still off).

SUCCESS!  The washer was working again and there were no leaks this time!  Getting the kick plate back on was the hardest part of the project and it really made me wish I had my machines on those laundry pedestals like this one: