Stinky Washing Machine

How To Clean a Washing Machine That Stinks.

How to Get Rid of Mold and Smells In Washers

As usual, there are a myriad of “How To Clean Your Washer” articles out there…each with their own spin, here is the easiest way to clean your front load washer and/or your top load washer. If you’ve got a stinky front-load washing machine, here’s how to get it smelling fresh again:

Clean Gasket: Use a rag or towel to clean the rubber door gasket on a front-loading washer with either hot soapy water or a spritz of mildew cleaner. Make sure to wipe underneath and around it as well. Be prepared for some slime and gunk, and possibly a stray sock or two!

Clean Dispensers: Remove the detergent dispensers and give them a good scrubbing. If they don’t come out, clean them as best you can, using a bottle or pipe cleaner to reach back into the crevices. On top load washers if your dispensers aren’t removable, warm 1 cup of white vinegar in the microwave or in a small saucepan. Pour it into the dispenser and allow it to sit for a few minutes to loosen any build up.

Run Cleaning Cycle Fill the washer with HOT water on the largest water level setting and select the extra rinse option (if applicable). Do not add any clothing. Add 1 cup of TSP (You can find this in the paint department of your local hardware store) – no detergent - and let the machine agitate for a minute, then let set for an hour. After one hour, allow the washer to run through its longest wash and spin cycle.

Repeat Cleaning Cycle Immediately fill the washer with HOT water again and add 2 cups of Odo Ban . (You can find this product at your local hardware store) – no detergent - and let the machine agitate for a minute, then let it sit for one hour.

While it is soaking, dip a scrubber sponge in the OdoBan water and detail all the nooks and crannies of your washer, including the gasket, plastic top, inner lid and fabric softner cup.

If your machine has built-in dispensers, clean those too. After an hour, run the longest wash and spin cycle again.

Your trusty washing machine should now be shiny clean and ready for more abuse

Professional Help: If you’ve tried every way to clean your front-load washer and it still smells, you may have a clogged drain or filter. A qualified washer repair technician can dismantle the machine and clean it for you, or you can unplug the machine and carefully explore and clean it yourself

Preventative Maintenance For Your Washing Machine

Once your machine is clean, follow these tips to keep it that way

• Air It Out: If possible, leave the door of the front-load washer cracked open to allow it to dry thoroughly between cycles. However, you shouldn’t do this if you have children or pets who could be tempted to climb (and possibly become trapped) inside the machine.
• Remove Loads Promptly: Be sure to remove wet clothes as soon as the cycle is finished. Set your washer to beep when it’s done, so you don’t forget. If you happen to forget and leave your laundry in the washer here is an easy fix from Last weeks blog How To Clean You Stinky, Smelly Towels.
• Choose Detergent Wisely: Choose low-sudsing detergents specifically made for high-efficiency (HE) machines. When possible, choose powder over liquid; liquid detergents are usually higher in suds. Unless washing soiled laundry it’s important to use no more than two tablespoons. Powders are much less prone to causing odor than liquid. HE (high efficiency which means low-sudsing) detergent is a must for HE washers.
• Avoid Fabric Softener: Liquid fabric softeners leave residue that contributes to mold in front-load washers. Instead, use dryer sheets or dryer balls to soften your clothes. It’s dispensed in the rinse cycle and tends to collect on the inside of the plastic outer tub. We recommend switching to dryer sheets. Keep in mind dryer sheets can also be overused and cause long dry times, towels to be less absorbent and to retain odor.

• Using mainly cold water for washing . That’s fine but a hot wash or soak as your last cycle on wash day will help dissolve residue buildup. It’s the perfect opportunity to do more soiled laundry. If the washer is not used regularly an extra rinse may also be a good idea.

Laundry Pods Post Serious Risk to Children

They’re squishy. They’re brightly colored. They’re convenient for adults. They’re extremely enticing to kids. And they’re extremely poisonous. We’re talking about detergent pods, which children often mistake for candy or toys and have landed more than 700 U.S. children in the hospital in two years, according to a research study. The most serious complications children have suffered are coma and seizures.

Consumer Reports has announced Thursday morning that it no longer recommends liquid laundry detergent pods after hospitals continue to have high-rates of accidental poisonings in young children, because they pose a serious health risk to children younger that six years old. Kids often mistake the colorful packets for candy resulting in a large amount of accidental poisonings. The chemicals are so concentrated that kids can end-up in danger in seconds.

Children often burst the detergent capsules or put them in their mouths. This can result in poisoning, but also burns to the eyes, mouth, and throat. In the study, 144 kids suffered eye injuries, 30 went into comas, and 12 had seizures.

Since poison of young children from household cleaning products is one of the top reasons for calls to poison control centers, it’s imperative that detergent pods and other chemicals are kept out of reach of little hands. It’s also important to post the number to your poison control center prominently in your home and educate your children that cleansers aren’t candy or toys. The organization is strongly urging households with children younger than six-years-old to stop buying them.

Parents and child caregivers can help children stay safe by following these tips:

• Parents with young children and child caregivers should use traditional laundry detergent, which is much less toxic than laundry detergent pods.
• Store laundry detergent pods up, away, and out of sight – in a locked cabinet is best.
• Close laundry detergent pod packages or containers and put them away immediately after use.
• Save the national Poison Help Line number (1-800-222-1222) in your cell phone and post it near your home phones.

Its that time of year, that people begin to use the kitchens to cook more and use their BBQ’s less. Given this knowledge we at All-Pro Appliance Repair have stocked up our trucks to cater to the many people who may just be turning their stove or oven on for the first time, as they prepare for the influx of extended family visiting.

The Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys, hams, or prime ribs that will no doubt be on the menu need to be perfectly roasted and of course the pumpkin pie and candied yams that are so popular cannot be compromised by an appliance that isn’t functioning as it was intended to.

A good tip to remember at this time of year: We do not recommend self-cleaning your oven prior to a big bake or cook day as this will occasionally cause thermostats to trip or door latches to fail or even worse sometimes electronic controls to fry! If you have a week or 2 to spare then by all means run the self-clean on your unit. Our best recommendation is to run this function after the family has taken their plates of left overs and have headed back home.

Appliance manufacturers understand that self-cleaning cycles are a problem. Customers demand self-cleaning options. They're so highly desired that it's very difficult to sell an oven without one. And yet when using the self clean option it's pushing an oven to do something that is fairly extreme and difficult to engineer, and so there are genuine risks of damaging the oven.

Self-cleaning, often with temperatures that go over 1000°, is a particular problem. The elements and the oven just get so hot — much, much hotter than the 350° to 500° range of normal baking — that sometimes fuses pop and control panels burn out. Not to mention the smoke and smells from self cleaning your oven. If the oven does have a problem after self cleaning, those hidden heating elements can make it much more expensive and difficult to fix. The entire oven has to be pulled out from the wall and fixed from behind, which makes it a more expensive service call, involving more time and trouble. The electronic control panel can be at greater risk of failure when subjected to the high temps in the self-cleaning cycle. If you have a self-cleaning oven, we do recommend that you use Easy-Off no bake-no smell oven cleaner for self-cleaning ovens which will be less harsh on the porcelain finish and far less expensive than an oven repair .

Also, when cleaning your range top or cooktop be very careful with the amount of water or cleaning solution you use around the knobs and also around the ignition device. We all know that water conducts electricity, hence when you splash water on a igniter that uses electricity to ignite it’s flame you run the risk of short circuiting the system and this can be very frustrating and scary as it will often cause burners to click excessively or sometimes spark, pop and burn up. It is not usually a fire hazard but using a damp cloth and a light amount of " Bar Keepers Friend " is more than enough to clean the unit and not scratch the smoothtop.

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Before the modern electric dryer, times were tough for the lint artist. There just weren’t enough belly buttons to go around for an ample supply of that fluffy, cottony goodness. Let’s not even get started on the lengths the cavemen had to travel to find it.

Todays modern life gives us refrigerators that keep our food cold, washing machines that clean dirty clothes, and more dryer lint than we know what to do with. The good news is that people will never run out of ideas on what to do with the things they don’t feel like throwing away. The bad news is, no matter how much it may remind you of the good ol’ days with grandpa at the carnival, you probably shouldn’t sniff that pink lint that’s left behind after drying all those cozy, red flannels.

Here’s a few things that you can do with your dryer lint if you just don’t have the heart to part with it.

FIRE STARTER - The first thing to note about dryer lint is that it is flammable. Aside from the fact that your dryer will run more efficently if its lint trap is cleaned before every load, With that said, you can use this lint trick to your advantage. A good way to store it is in an old coffee can – it needs to stay nice and dry for this effect to work (this was among the biggest mistakes of the cavemen). You can bring it along on camping trips or keep some in your car for emergencies. During a zombie apocalypse, it would be smart to escape the freeway on foot ONLY with some type of improvised flaming device to ward off the undead until you find better cover. Tip within a tip: the more you twist it, the slower it will burn .

CLAY - If you’re a down and out sculptor in the Paseo district or you had a close encounter of the third kind but then ran out of mashed ‘taters, don’t worry! You can always make some homemade lint clay to work on your next masterpiece. All you will need (besides a cool Hipster name) is: 2 Cups of lint (firmly packed) 1/3 Cup warm water 6 tablespoons of white glue 1 Tablespoon of clear dishwashing liquid The rest is really simple: you mix and mush all this stuff together until you get a uniform consistency. I’m sure you’ll make Andy Warhol proud.

ART - Bizarre as it may seem, people have also been using lint as a direct art medium. By selecting different colors and textures, you can have a full palette of fuzz to work with. These ‘paintings’ are really more like a hybrid of paintings, and sculptures all in one: Leonardo Di Vinci, anyone

PACKING MATERIAL - This one is for the ecologically-minded conservationist in all of us. Lint is probably the softest dry goods ‘garbage’ that humans produce, so why not put it to good use? If you don’t want the lint to get all over whatever you have packaged, you can put the lint in freezer bags.

You might not think about lint that often, but it’s quite likely that when you do, you think, “ throw it in the trash,” and that could be a real shame. Whether you want to be a better fire starter because you missed that episode on doomsday preppers or you’re just one sculpture away from your Ingrid Bergman the NUN , remember: lint isn’t just laundry dust. It’s magical laundry dust.

Tom Cruise: There's nothing like a good old-fashioned fridge sniffing session. Now smelling one after the power has been out a couple/three days, I can understand, but when it's new?

As legend has it, Tom was was spotted while out shopping for a new refrigerator when he was seen taking getting up close and personal with the appliance and just had to know what it smelled like.

According to an eyewitness: “Tom came back in today, but seemed a little distanced. When we asked him if he needed any help, he ignored us and wandered away.”

“A moment later, he started sniffling appliances. It was pretty bizarre, when we asked him what he was doing he replied, “Just shopping…” He ended up buying the Refrigerator, so it’s all good.”

However, further investigation reveals that this photo is, sadly, a fake. We’re as disappointed as you are. I know I would prefer to live in a world in which Tom Cruise sniffs appliances, but alas, it was just a gimmicky marketing ploy by an appliance dealer.

Oh well. Hopefully next week will dredge up something equally ludicrous, like Miley Cyrus using a toaster as a tongue stretcher, or Johnny Depp using a dryer to de-thaw a turkey. We can dream.

Why it is generally better to repair your appliances than it is to buy new.

We really do put our money where our mouth is!

We’ve become a throwaway society: something isn’t working right and our first instinct is to replace it altogether.

But, there are a lot of kitchen and laundry appliances that could be repaired just as easily — and for a lot less money. At All Pro Appliance, we emphasize repair over purchase with our customers.

We push repairs because that is what we honestly believe in, and by allowing our beliefs to become our business model, our customers know that they can trust us to do what we think is right, not just most profitable.

Perhaps you, too, will be “aficionados for repair” once you read more about why we feel so strongly about it.

• Repairs cost less than new purchases, while adding years of use. Spending a few hundred dollars always beats spending additional hundreds, if not thousands. And if that lower expense also extends the life of your equipment for additional years (which is the whole point of doing it), then all the better, right?
• Older equipment is usually better-made equipment. This might not be true for maximum energy efficiency, in some cases. But the trade-off in a slightly lower efficiency can be more than offset by the quality of a system’s parts. Yesterday’s machines were made with quality metals; today’s are often made with cheaper metal composites and plastics. So a new machine is far more prone to breakdowns…and paying for that over and over is certainly not an efficient use of your time or money.
• Newer equipment often uses complicated computer technologies. That is why today’s appliances can often overheat and experience other unexpected problems. (For example, did you know that simply by opening your washer’s door or adjusting its knobs while it’s operating could cause two motors to burn out?) So replacing “ol’ reliable” before it’s absolutely necessary can introduce a costly “ol’ unreliable” into your home. And repairing electronic equipment will always cost you more money than it would to fix simpler mechanical equipment.
• Electronic control boards are always at risk. Most consumers don’t realize that today’s more complicated electrical systems are at risk for costly damage even when they are not being used. A power surge or brown-out can attack a modern appliance’s computer motherboard(s), shorting out or eliminating it's ability to operate without expensive replacement.
• Repairing supports the United States of America in more ways than one. Over the past decade or so, more appliance-related jobs have been outsourced overseas. Thousands of American workers have been laid off and once-vital neighborhood factories have shut down. So (1) buying new equipment actually rewards corporations for this behavior. (2) A lot of earlier, high-quality parts are still inventoried by a vital network of U.S. distributors, many “Mom & Pop” businesses, so ordering these inventoried parts can help Americans keep their homes and raise their children. And (3) repairing is a form of recycling, keeping more appliances in our homes and fewer in our landfills and scrap yards.

Yes, we could probably make more money urging new appliances at the first sign of trouble. But for all the reasons stated above, we remain confident that repair is always the better course of action whenever possible.

Let’s put it this way: When we tell you it is time to buy a new machine, you can be certain that we are telling you the truth.

Should you need a new appliance, All Pro Appliance can give you a referral for a new one at an affordable price, because we have aligned ourselves with some of Oklahoma's leading appliance distributors.