Care, cleaning and troubleshooting for washers, dryers, dishwashers, refrigerators and ovens.
Most people clean the inside of a microwave and stop. There is a small panel on the side wall — usually a beige or grey rectangle about the size of a playing card — that almost nobody touches, and it is the part most likely to cause an actual fault. What that panel is It … Read more
A tumble dryer that needs two cycles to dry one load is not wearing out. It is telling you that the air cannot get out. A dryer works by moving heated air through the drum and carrying the moisture away. Every restriction in the path from the drum to the outside wall reduces that airflow, … Read more
Of all the maintenance jobs on a refrigerator, cleaning the condenser coils has the best return for the time it takes. It costs twenty minutes once or twice a year, and on a neglected machine it can cut the compressor’s running time noticeably. The coils are how the fridge gets rid of heat. Refrigerant picks … Read more
If your laundry comes out of a front-load washer smelling faintly of a damp basement, the machine is almost certainly not the problem. The door gasket is. That flexible rubber boot between the door and the drum is the one part of the machine designed to hold water in — and it does the job … Read more
A washing machine that bangs, shuffles across the floor, or vibrates hard enough to rattle things off a shelf is almost never broken. It is out of level, or it is still bolted for transit, and both are fixable in under half an hour. The reason it matters more on a washing machine than on … Read more
A cooker hood works by pulling air through a filter. When that filter is saturated with grease, the airflow drops, the fan works harder, and the extraction that was the entire point of the appliance stops happening. Grease then goes where it would have gone without a hood — onto cabinet doors, the ceiling, and … Read more
There are three ways to clean an oven, and choosing the wrong one for your oven is how people end up with a dead heating element, a ruined liner, or a cavity that looks worse than when they started. Before anything else, find out which type of interior you have. It determines everything that follows. … Read more
If your dishwasher has started leaving a fine grit on the inside of glasses, or the bottom of the tub smells before you have even opened the door, the filter is the first place to look — and on most machines it has never been touched. This catches people out because of a design change. … Read more
Limescale is calcium carbonate, deposited out of hard water every time it is heated. It does not damage anything quickly, but it insulates heating elements, restricts flow paths, and eventually it starts breaking off in flakes that end up in the cup. The chemistry is simple and it dictates the method: calcium carbonate dissolves in … Read more
A refrigerator door seal is a part that fails slowly and invisibly. It does not tear or fall off. It goes stiff, or picks up a permanent kink from a jar left against it, and from then on the compressor runs a little longer every hour to make up for the air it is losing. … Read more