John found a discarded TL Neppie behind an appliance store last Thursday night and he and Jason brought it and some other things home. Saturday afternoon about 5, John calls up and asks if I would like to see the thing run. So I went down to his shop and he had the magnet positioned to bypass the lid switch and had some towels and a rug or two in it. It is a strange and sad machine. It makes a loud whirring sound when agitating because of the plastic gear teeth on the perimeter of each of the two tumbler discs. It tumbles for a number of seconds and then pauses. It does not reverse, but then starts up in the same direction. John says that the pauses are to give the clothes a chance to heal. Consumer Reports said that it was very hard on fabrics. It starts to slowly spin before the drain pump turns on. It has a terrible time dealing with the suds that the slowly spinning perforated tub creates. The pump sudslocks and does not cycle on and off in the half-ass, I mean intermediate, spin after the wash. So with sudsy water remaining in the sump, it stops and SLOWLY starts to fill for the rinse. That rinse was sort of a mess with the suds water, so John set it for a spin. Max Extract is 13 minutes, and it does cycle the pump on and off to pump out the water, but it has an awful time trying to balance the load and many times, the code flashed up that meant we were to open the lid and try to reposition the load so that it could spin. Well, you get the load looking sorta balanced and when you restart the machine, the first thing it does is give about a half turn of the wash wheels which move load into an unbalanced position. We finally managed, after quickly reaching in and moving things back to a balanced position that the wheels had pushed up when it started to spin again, to get it to spin a bit before it shut off again. There is a black plastic strut attached to the front left hand corner of the cabinet that has its other end attached to the top of the outer tub. This little plastic mechanism, which measures the movement of the plunger attached to the tub within the stationary case attached to the front of the machine is the unbalance switch. Finally John unfastened the plunger from the outer tub, folded the mechanism up against the cabinet and taped it in place with the plunger about halfway between fully in and fully out. We only managed to get about a 600 rpm spin out of it, but we had to do another rinse so we started that filling. About the time it started moving, I wondered aloud how much water it would hold, just as John handed me a hose. We managed to fill the tub all the way over the wheels for a thorough deep rinse and it never activated a flood switch like if you try to fill a Calypso too full. The final spin was another series of maddening starts and stops to achieve the spin, pause, tumble, spin sequences of front loaders trying to spin out most of the water before the high speed spin. It finally got going, but the speed was never that great. We had a nice LONG visit, but that machine is a PITAPOS. I am sorry, but that is the only way to describe it. Using it was one of those, "been there, done that, hated it" experiences.
Neptune top loader
- Thread starter tomturbomatic
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So Tom, you and John are then impressed with the Maytag Neptune TL 
In a pig's eye.
runematic
Well-known member
More than likely it has a bad clutch (p/n# 12002211) and that's why the half-turn of the clothing. We had the same problem with a unit we had sold used. What a frustrating problem. The washer's owner loved her washer & wanted us to fix it in the worst way. After replacing this part in July, we've had no call back (knock on wood).
1/2 Turn of Paddles
Actually I don't believe that has anything to do with the clutch from what I can tell with the one I have in my basement at the moment. It does that half turn to switch the transmission over from turning the wash paddles to spinning the wash basket.
Actually I don't believe that has anything to do with the clutch from what I can tell with the one I have in my basement at the moment. It does that half turn to switch the transmission over from turning the wash paddles to spinning the wash basket.
Maybe that's why it was discarded behind the appliance store,it has a mechanical problem.
runematic
Well-known member
Unimatic1140, just doing what Maytag Factory Service recommends.
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