1. Wake the washer by pressing any button.
2. Wait 5 seconds.
3. Press and HOLD the Start/Pause and Cancel buttons simultaneously.
As long as the buttons are held, the failure code will appear in the display as an E followed by two numbers, a number and a letter or two letters. The control will beep and the Door Lock, Wash, Rinse, and Final Spin indicator lights will flash.
Quick Check
If there is no error displayed and the washer momentarily starts then turns back off:
1. Listen for a relay closure inside the motor control shortly after the Start/Pause key is pressed. If this happens, the motor control has power.
2. Check the 5 pin connector wiring between the console control and the motor control.
NOTE: During normal operation, the display may show:
“SAn” – deep clean (Sanitary Cycle)
“cd” – cool down (Sanitary cycle)
“do” or “dr” – door problem.
“Err” – an error has been detected.
“LOC” – control lock is activated.
“PAU” – cycle has been interrupted.
This is an oldie problem with a tech bulletin first issued in 2001 but it still comes up every now and then these days. You put your glass under the in-door water dispenser and press the button for water. Your glass starts filling with water but so does the icemaker, making a big frozen mess inside the freezer.
“Neutral drain” refers to the mechanical feature of the transmission in the Whirlpool-built direct drive washers to keep the basket from spinning– in neutral– while the tub is being drained. The reasons for doing this are obvious:
– reduce wear and tear on the washer’s drive components, the motor, coupler, clutch, and transmission and
– to prevent the possibility of water riding up the the side of the basket and sloshing over as the basket comes up to speed.
The two most common causes for messing up the neutral and letting the basket spin during pump out are either a bad transmission or a bad timer. But determining which one is the bad actor is the tricky part. But that’s why we professional appliantologists makes the big money.
See if you can snatch these pebbles from my hand…
A properly functioning wash cycle in these machines consists of:
Fill==> Agitate==> Drain==> Pause==> Spin (repeat for rinse cycle)
If the washer immediately starts to spin and drain, then you need either a
Sublime Master of Appliantology john63 sums this up with a nice, succinct rule-of-thumb:
Any time that a Whirlpool / Kenmore direct-drive washer fails to *neutral drain* after 3 minutes of agitation (at room temperature) the transmission is the culprit.
Replacing the neutral drain kit, while less expensive, is much more time consuming and requires disassembling the transmission, replacing the neutral drain assembly, refilling it with transmission oil and then reinstalling in the washer. Professional servicers almost never do this because the time consumed would quickly exceed the cost of replacing the transmission; so simple economics dictates that professional servicers replace the entire transmission since this is a relatively fast and easy job.
Replacing the transmission as a unit is also a more reliable repair because other things can and do go wrong with the transmission. For example, if the there is a pause after draining but the washer never goes into spin (and the motor is running, of course), then the transmission is shot and need to be replaced; this failure is not related to the neutral drain assembly.
Here’s a good video on how to replace the transmission: