My washing machine has stopped spinning properly

Hi. Large loads can cause it too, it’s just that people don’t seem to expect it with small loads, so it’s more common. People often immediately suspect overloading but rarely suspect under loading.

If it’s suddenly developed this issue then it seems fair to suspect a fault. But the behaviour you described is typical with unbalanced loads, so best to ensure it’s not that first.

An unbalanced load can be caused by not enough, or too much laundry, with the latter being most common with mixed loads of light and heavy items.

For example if there’s a load of laundry in, but mixed in with it is one large heavy item, or maybe a couple of towels, then the drum can be unbalanced.

When unbalanced, the machine tries to ramp up to spin speed but decides it’s not safe to do so and ramps down or stops. It tries again but if still unbalanced it repeats the behaviour.

Any properly designed washing machine should be able to eventually recognise what’s happening and give up with some light flashing or error code telling the user why it didn’t spin. Surprisingly many don’t.

If a load is genuinely unbalanced you should be able to see the whole drum swaying from side to side and the noise of the motor should be fluctuating up and down.

If you don’t think it’s unbalanced it may be a fault in the pcb, or the out of balance sensors, but a fault on the pressure system where the washer doesn’t get the signal that water has successfully pumped away can also prevent spin.

Thanks for the response Andy.

The behaviour it has been doing is starting a spin cycle, slowly increasing speed but at a certain point stopping and trying again. It continues doing this forever (or at least for several hours). It got progressively worse, ie we used to spin at the highest speed but found that doing slower spins were more successful. It also got to the point that it wouldn't advance from washing to rinsing as the little spin it does between them was enough to make it start doing the same thing. It does spin OK with an empty drum. And also with small loads, but not with large ones - the opposite of what you suggested.

Since I replaced the shock absorbers it definitely spins more smoothly and seem to be work better. But it still went into that infinite spin-retry state at least once.

However the very last time we ran it (which is since my original post) it managed a reasonably large load all the way through. Now I don't know what to thing.