The Steaming Rants of Ernie Wight

Will nobody blow up the widow's washing machine ?

I e-mailed a poster (Coy Forks) on the local newsgroup to ask him if he would blow up my Hotpoint washer-drier and make a short video of the explosion. "Define blow-up", he replied by mail. "Demolish outwards using pyrotechnic material", I shot back. When Forks gets tricky I get worried. He is a man to whom C5 was not Sinclairs' greatest folly, but something his parents gave him each Christmas instead of plasticine.

It was the week after the Bali bombing, and I suppose I should have expected his reticence and uncharacteristic coyness. I had just had enough with the not-old Hotpoint washer-drier and had bought replacements (Hoover and Zanussi), and hadn't paid for removal of the old machine. I had another purpose for it.

For the past few weeks I had been getting back soaked to the skin, and regularly had to remove the top cover of this Hotpoint machine to press loose wires back into the connector block on the main motor in order to try and get a wash load to complete the spin or dry cycle. I had to place the water outlet pipe in the low-level drain in order to get the water to run out of the machine when the pump was supposed to be working, and lift the hose back into the high position when the machine needed to refill itself with water.

Why, some of the cleverer ones amongst you are thinking, did I not call in a washing repair man ? Some of the wiser ones amongst you will know that clever thoughts are not always the wisest ones. I had called in a washing repair man, two, in fact.

Some time ago, I had bought a new Hotpoint Ultima 1200 washer-drier from a local electrical shop. They delivered it, installed it, and I used it, quite happily. Until one day, when it refused to pump out the water, and sat beeping smugly with E30 showing on the LCD display. E30, I found from the instruction sheet, meant "Call your service man".

I rang up the shop who had supplied the machine, and they suggested a local repair man. He came, looked, complained that this was typical Hotpoint, they never issued repairers with the board diagrams, it was obviously the board, I would need to call Hotpoint. He said everything except "Ooh, Guvnor" that the stereotype suggested he should say.

I phoned up Hotpoint, gave them the machine identification details, and they explained the deal to me. The machine was still (just) within the 4-year warranty period. Great, I though. But, they explained, the 4-year warranty period only covered parts, not the engineer's attendance to investigate and fix the fault. That would cost £70. I gave them the go-ahead.

The engineer arrived, and spent an hour diagnosing a broken wire. I wrote out the cheque, and received a warranty sheet covering his work for 3 months. For a while life was simple and automated again.

3 months and 3 weeks later, the machine again stopped at the end of the wash cycle with the water still in, beeping smugly with E30 showing on the LCD display. I decided to look for the broken wire myself. I found it easily, it had snapped off close to a scotch-lock type connector that joined 8 identical white wires to the motor. However, the lid of the connector which forced the wires into the insulation-displacement prongs had buckled with heat from the motor, and would not snap shut and stay locked. I was now outside the 4-year parts warranty period, and decided I had paid Hotpoint more than enough for crap design, and over the next few months regularly opened up the machine to replace the wire, and sometimes a neighbouring one, as they came loose again and again. I kept meaning to solder the wires into position, but it was one of those jobs that never quite bubbled up to the top of the list, and one day, there was a loud explosion from the far end of the building, and nothing on the LCD display.

Now, with the old machine taking up space outside the front door, I wanted to express my displeasure with Hotpoint. I hope that the reasons for my displeasure are obvious. I wanted to take a short video of the machine exploding, with parts spiralling down to the ground out of a large rolling orange-yellow fireball, and place it on my website as an AVI file.

Sadly, this isn't going to happen. I'm not going to risk any lives or limbs to try an achieve what would be a rather trivial piece of revenge. I thought for a while of taking round to the Langfords scrapyard on the other side of the railway line and getting it converted into a very small cube of metal which I could then send to Hotpoint by carrier, but I am spending far too much money already with PorcelFarce, and would have nothing left to show at the end of it all.

I have decided to rip the guts out of the machine and convert the case into a bead-blast cabinet. That way I feel I am at least gaining something palpable from the experience.

If I regret anything, it is that I will not have the pleasure of watching an explosion over and over again, saying to myself "I not only got mad, I got even". When the going gets tricky, the trick-cyclists back-pedal.