Washing machine repairs you can do yourself — where to stop

Where the line comes from

Gas work in Great Britain is restricted by law to Gas Safe registered engineers, which is why this site can be blunt about boilers. Washing machines are different. There is no statutory register for appliance repair, no qualification anyone is required to hold, and no offence in taking the back off your own machine. Anyone may legally repair one.

That does not make it safe, and the honest way to describe the line is by what is inside the cabinet. A washing machine puts mains voltage, a heating element and a drum of water in one steel box, and some of the components a fault points at — the motor control, the board — hold a charge after the plug is out. So the manufacturers publish a set of checks that stay outside that box, and send everything else to what this site calls a qualified appliance engineer: someone competent to work on it, described by their competence rather than by a card nobody is required to carry.

Before anything: the recall that changes the order

Whirlpool are running a recall on Hotpoint and Indesit washing machines manufactured between October 2014 and February 2018. The Office for Product Safety and Standards describes the fault: a component in the door lock system can overheat when the heating element is running, and depending on the model that can pose a risk of fire. The recall was announced on 17 December 2019 and covers an estimated 500,000 machines, and the model checker was still live when this was written in September 2026.

If you have a Hotpoint or Indesit from that period, check it before you do anything else, whatever code it is showing. Whirlpool's model checker at washingmachinerecall.whirlpool.co.uk takes the model and serial number; the helpline is 0800 316 1442. The regulator's advice for an affected machine is to unplug it and register for the free repair or replacement. Whirlpool's interim advice at the time of the announcement, for people who could not stop using one immediately, was to run cold cycles at 20°C or below only, because the door lock component overheats when the heating element is active.

How to find your washing machine's model number covers where the two numbers are. Note that the recall affects a subset of machines within each listed model, so the checker matters more than the list.

Making it safe first

Unplug the machine at the socket, not just at the panel. On an integrated machine the socket is usually in the adjacent cupboard; if it is out of reach, switch off at the wall switch that feeds it. Then turn off the tap on the inlet hose. If water is coming out of the machine while it is running, do those two things in that order and stop — several manufacturers rate a leak while energised as a stop-using-it fault, and Bosch's E23 and Zanussi's EF3 are both exactly that.

The checks the manufacturers publish for owners

The pump filter

This is the single most useful procedure in the category, because drainage codes are the largest family: Hotpoint F05, Bosch E18, Zanussi E20, LG OE, Samsung 5E and Beko E5 all point at it, and every one of those manufacturers publishes the filter as an owner job.

The filter sits behind a flap at the bottom front of the machine, usually to one side. Not every model has one — Hotpoint qualify their own instruction with "if applicable to model" and tell you to check the handbook — so if there is no flap, do not go looking behind the kick plate for something that is not there.

Put a towel down and a shallow tray under the flap, because whatever is in the drum is coming out through this hole. On a machine that stopped mid-cycle that can be several litres. Some machines have a small emergency drain hose beside the filter for exactly this purpose; if yours does, use it first. Then the warning that matters, which is Bosch's own: the water may be very hot with a risk of scalding, so set the programme to Off and pull the plug before you start, and do not open the filter on a machine that has just aborted a 60°C wash. Let it stand.

Unscrew the filter slowly, anticlockwise, controlling the flow. Clear whatever is in it — coins, buttons and hair grips are the usual finds — and check the pump impeller behind it turns freely. Refit it firmly, then do the check Bosch put at the end of their own procedure: pour about a litre of water into the detergent drawer and run the drain or pump programme, so that a badly seated filter shows itself on your kitchen floor rather than behind the machine a week later.

The drain hose and the waste

Hotpoint's instruction book for one of their current machines lists four causes for a drain fault, and the filter is only the first. The others are a kinked drain hose, a blocked drain hose or sink trap, and — on a new installation — a blanking cap or spigot on the under-sink connection that was never removed. That last one catches people who have just had a kitchen fitted, and it is worth checking before you pay anyone to look at a machine that has never drained.

Water in

The fill family is the mirror image: Zanussi E10, LG IE, Samsung 4E. Check the tap is fully open and the inlet hose is not kinked behind the machine. Then the filters: there is a small mesh filter where the inlet hose meets the machine, and on Bosch machines with AquaStop a second one at the tap end, and Bosch publish cleaning both as an owner procedure. Indesit's H2O display is this fault with no code attached.

The load, the balance and the detergent

Samsung and LG both show UE for an unbalanced load and both rate it as something for the owner: redistribute the washing, do not wash a single heavy item alone, and check the machine is level on its feet. Too much detergent produces its own displays — Samsung's Sud, Bosch's foam symbol, Hoover's E4 — and the remedy is less detergent and a rinse, not a repair.

The door

Check nothing is trapped in the seal, and give a locked door the minutes the interlock needs: Hoover say two to three after unplugging on their E7 code, and the Electrolux group describe a drain of up to three minutes before the door releases. How to reset a washing machine has the full detail on door release and on the displays that look like faults and are not.

Where to stop, and why

The manufacturers are consistent about which codes get a remedy and which get a phone number, and the split follows the hazard.

The heater. The element sits in the outer tub, under the drum, in the water. Zanussi's instruction on their E60 heating fault is to unplug the machine and not plug it back in until you are certain it is safe, and they publish no owner check. Miele's F20 is the same fault under a different number. Testing a heater means a meter on live terminals inside the cabinet, and replacing one means the tub open.

The motor and its module. Zanussi's E50 and LG's CE are motor faults, and both manufacturers say to unplug the machine and have it repaired — LG add "close the water tap". The motor control module is one of the parts that holds a charge after the plug is out, which is why this is the line even though the motor itself is a bolt-on component.

The control board. Miele mark two thirds of their fifty-one codes as technical faults for an engineer. LG give nine of their fifteen codes no owner remedy at all. Hotpoint and Indesit publish a phone number and nothing else on ten of their fourteen. When a manufacturer who is happy to tell you to clean a filter declines to give you anything to try, that is information.

Anything that involves water arriving while the machine is faulty. Bosch E23, Zanussi EF3, LG AE and Beko EA2 are all rated danger on this site because the machine has lost, or has detected the failure of, the thing that stops water coming in. Tap off, plug out, engineer.

What it costs, and when a repair stops making sense

Every code page in this category carries a researched cost range, and across the washing machine corpus they run from nothing — a filter cleaned, a hose unkinked — to about £350 for a motor or module on a premium machine. The cheap end is nearly all of the drainage and fill family, done yourself. The expensive end is the parts behind the line above, with a call-out on top.

Two things shift that arithmetic and are worth knowing before you book. Beko publish a ten-year parts guarantee on their large appliances, and LG a ten-year warranty on the Direct Drive motor fitted to their machines. Both cover the part rather than the labour, but a motor under warranty changes the answer to "is it worth repairing" completely, and a machine's age is on its rating plate.

Booking an engineer well

An engineer arriving with the right part is a one-visit repair. Have three things ready: the model and serial number; the exact code, including whether a character might be a 5 or an S, a 1 or an I; and what the machine was doing when it stopped — mid-wash, mid-spin, never filled, drum full of water. If the drum is full, say so, because they will bring a means of draining it.

Finally, register the machine. AMDEA's Register My Appliance portal links through to the manufacturers' own registration pages and takes older appliances as well as new ones. It is the mechanism by which a manufacturer finds you when a safety repair is needed, and the door lock recall above — where the manufacturer struggled to trace owners — is the case for using it.

Sources

The owner procedures are the manufacturers' own: Bosch and BSH support articles on the drain pump and inlet filters, including the scald warning and the litre-of-water check; the Hotpoint support portal and the WMAOD 844 instruction book on drainage causes; LG's owner's manual; Samsung's check-code table; Beko FAQs; and Electrolux-group platform documentation. The recall is described by the Office for Product Safety and Standards and Whirlpool's own checker. The registration route is Register My Appliance, run by AMDEA with the support of Electrical Safety First and the fire and rescue services. Cost ranges are the ones researched for each code page on this site, and are indicative rather than quotes.