"Fluffy" made a fur ball mess in this Asko washer

[jben]

I went and purchased this Asko washer the other day. The gentleman said it came with the house they purchased a year ago and that they had been using it during that time but recently they replaced this one with a new LG.

It was disconnected when I saw it and when I first spun the inner drum I was surprised to hear a ruff and noisy sound. I immediately thought it must be the bearings and was about ready to just try and make a graceful exit. However, the drum itself had no play and then after a few more back and forth rotations the noise stopped. Strange.

I got it home and removed the lower coin-trap cover and only found two coins inside; not bad. I did get the impression that someone may have been using too much detergent so I thought I'd start by doing a good flush. I used a water hose and ran about 3 or 4 tubs full of water through it. Out came what looked like many, many small pieces of saturated brown cardboard paper, but I'm not for certain what the material was.

At this point I thought I'd better just take off the bottom front cover to further check inside the base area. When I pulled off that cover I was shocked!

I found the bottom, especially towards the front, was just packed with what appears to be cat hair. It just spilled out but it didn’t look like any of the hair had affecting any of the operating parts down there – just covering and surrounding everything. It was also up on the top side in the control board, but to lesser extent.

It will be later next week before I can actually hook the machine up for a few test loads to see if it is still working properly as I was told. If so, you can bet it will get a boil wash or two either with bleach, vinegar or citric acid ?

It took me over 4 hours to clean this mess up! My only guess is that maybe someone placed a box or papers inside the washer, left the door open and that became the cat's home. Regardless, if I could have gotten hold of fluffy at his point I think she might have gotten a few minutes at 1,400 rpm's...

 

[qsd-dan]

Revenge of the crazy cat lady.

I would have expected that outcome from a dryer but never a washer.

 

[jben]

I guess this is what they call Scrud ?

It appears a past owner really over did the detergents and fabric softener as I continued to get the "scrud" coming out with each wash cycle. What I had originally speculated might have been paper from a cardboard box I now believe was just a huge build of crust or scrud that was between the tubs.

I first did two normal hot or "boil wash" cycles with citric acid. Lot's of debris and dirty water was coming out with each rinse, and that debris just kept coming. Eventually I ran another boil wash cycle, this time with the Cascade Professional "Fryer Boil Out" DW powder. That seemed to have a much different affect than the citric acid and I'm glad I tried it.

After that Cascade cycle was complete; there was a slimy white film on the interior drum surface. Perhaps either fabric softener or what at one time was liquid detergent.

I elected to now run another boil wash using a heavy dose of my regular laundry powder - Charlie's Soap, along with a higher water level. As that wash cycle was progressing (and water temp was increasing) I noticed heavy foam was showing and rising on the door window. I'd never seen that with this detergent before. I went to do something else for 10 minutes and when I returned I was shocked to find foam / suds completely overflowing the machine. It was already coming out of the top detergent drawer and spilling down on the floor! I immediately shut off the power to the machine because I was concerned that the suds might had risen so high to get into the electronic control panel area. (I pulled the top cover and was glad to find that was not the case - the suds was contained and just rising up the inlet hose that goes from the detergent drawer into the top of the tub).

Fast forward, now I've done a couple of cycles with clothing and probably 8 to 10 cycles in total. The rinse water is finally clearing up but I'm still continuing to get this debris that comes out (but only about 20% from what it was at first).

See the first picture - it's hard to see but all of those small fragments are under about two inches of clear rinse water. Is this what is generally called "Scrud"?

The other two pictures are the bottom end after I finally got most of that cat hair out of there. I think this neglected washer is starting to respond to the "love" it's been given.