Washing machine

Here’s what to do if your washing machines goes through its cycle until it gets to spin, and then instead of spinning, sits there full of water refusing to open its door.

Your problem is that the pump isn’t kicking into action to drain the cylinder to enable the spin cycle to start. This is likely to be for one of two reasons:

1. Your pump is knackered;
2. Your filter and pump are clogged, so the pump cannot spin.

Fortunately in my case it was the latter. The way to fix it is as follows. Get to the bottom of the machine on the front and drain the filter by uncorking the narrow rubber pipe on the front and directing the (stinky, stagnant) water into a container (1 litre+ may come out so don’t uncork it until you are ready with the container). If it’s stuck and won’t drain, you can poke about with the dip stick inside the rubber pipe to free it. Then unscrew and remove the filter which is on the left, bottom, front. Take the filter out and thoroughly wash all the gunk off with warm water. The pump is behind where the filter was before you took it out. Take a bit of rag and clear all the gunk and/or anything that might be stuck in there (pennies, paperclips, etc) out from in front of and around the pump. The pump blades should now be able to spin if you twizzle them with your finger. Stick the filter back in and run the machine empty on short cycle to see if it works and to flush clean water through the system to get all the stagnant water out. If it goes through all the cycles OK, it’s fixed and ready for a load of wash. If it still doesn’t work, your pump is probably knackered.

Labels: teccie

Blogger

The archives for this page used to be on a separate page, listed by month. This page had a separate template within Blogger and was automatically updated by the Blogger CMS. However, since the transition to “New Blogger” in 2007, it appears that, without fanfare, Blogger have withdrawn this functionality. The monthly archive pages themselves were still being created (eg January 2007) but the index page was not being updated. This is because most people on Blogger are using the Blogger standard templates, which feature archives on the sidebar of the main page, rather than on a separate page, as was more commonly the case in the old days. It took me some time and a lot of google searching to find this out and figure out why the archive index page was stubbornly refusing to update notwithstanding that everything else seemed to be working properly.

The work–around is a toggle in the sidebar. This itself presented a number of difficulties. My sidebar is an SSI and you cannot call the <Blogger> tags to generate the archive list from it, because they can only be called from within the Blogger template that generates the main page. Therefore, I had to put the <Blogger> tags somewhere in the main template (under the “want more?” link at the bottom of the page) and encase them in a <div> tag, from which I could then extract the Blogger generated html listing the archives for repetition in my sidebar by using the getElementByID() method. A second problem then arose. Because the sidebar appears on pages other than the page which contains the main blog (and therefore the <div> containing the archives), an error obviously occured when the sidebar code was trying to extract and repeat something which was not there. The solution was to run an if/else statement, so that the extraction was only attempted where there was something to extract. The sidebar code is as follows:

<a href="/" onclick="toggle('bararchives');return false;" title="Hide or show archives below">Archives</a><div id="bararchives" style="display:none;"><script type="text/javascript">

if (document.getElementById("archives"))
{

var x=document.getElementById("archives");
var y=(x.innerHTML);

document.writeln(y);

}

else

{document.writeln('archives can only be accessed from <a href="http://www.foxinternet.co.uk">main page</a>')

}

</script>

</div>

The toggle() function that is called onClick() within the above is a function that I had already coded in order to toggle the blogroll.

Thank you, Blogger, for giving me this small challenge to enliven my otherwise dull existence.

Labels: Blogger, teccie