Washing machine symbols

What it usually means

Sorting out which set you are looking at is most of the work. Care labels sewn into clothes follow a published international standard, so the same symbol means the same thing on a shirt bought in Leeds and one bought in Lisbon. The icons printed on your machine's dial and display follow no standard whatever — they are each manufacturer's own drawing of their own programmes — which is why a chart of laundry symbols will never explain the flashing picture on your Beko.

Take the clothes first, because there is a real system behind them. There are only five basic shapes and they always appear in the same order: a washtub for washing, a triangle for bleaching, a square for drying, an iron for ironing, and a circle for professional cleaning. Everything else is a modification of one of those five, and three modifications carry nearly all the meaning. A number inside the washtub is the maximum temperature in Celsius. A bar underneath any symbol means treat it more gently — one bar for a reduced action cycle such as synthetics, two bars for the gentlest, such as wool or delicates. And a cross through a symbol means do not do this at all.

Learn those three rules and the labels stop being a code. A tub with 40 and one bar is a forty degree wash on a synthetics programme. A tub with a hand in it is hand wash only, and the water should be no warmer than about forty. A crossed-out square with a circle in it means do not tumble dry, while the same square with a circle and one dot means tumble dry on low heat and two dots means normal heat. Dots inside the iron work the same way, from one for the coolest setting up to three for cotton and linen. A circle with a P inside is for the dry cleaner rather than for you, and a crossed circle means it cannot be dry cleaned either. One trap worth knowing: dots inside the washtub instead of a number are an American convention that turns up on imported clothing, where one dot is thirty degrees, and it is easy to misread as something to do with the machine.

Now the machine, which is a different problem. Because these icons are proprietary, the honest answer is that the manual for your model is the authority and a general chart will mislead you. What is worth knowing is which family a symbol belongs to. Programme icons are pictures of fabrics and actions — a cotton boll, a shirt or a T-shirt for synthetics, a ball of wool or a hand in a tub for the gentlest cycle, a spiral for spin, a tap or a droplet for rinse, a feather or a leaf for eco. Option icons sit around the dial: a clock for delay start, a half-full tub for a half load, a plus or a temperature for boosting, an iron with a cross for easy-iron.

Then there are indicator symbols, and these are the ones people actually search for, because they appear when something is wrong. A padlock means the door is locked, which during a cycle is normal and after a cycle usually means the machine cannot drain and is refusing to open on water. A padlock combined with a key, or one that survives switching off, is generally the child lock instead. A tap or a dripping tap points at the water supply. On machines with no display at all, the message is carried by which lights are lit rather than by an icon, and the manufacturers publish those combinations as fault codes in their own right — the pattern is the code. That is the point at which a symbol stops being a symbol and becomes a fault worth looking up.