How to replace surface elements on an elecric range

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A few months ago, I repaired the washing machine and wrote about it in a blog posting. Lately, our Whirlpool stove was acting up, not heating up its burners (aka surface elements) until they were ‘wiggled’ a bit. It’s actually been a recurring problem for a while, but was isolated to just one or two elements. Over the past year, it seemed that all of them have been having the same issue at one time or another.


First I took them out and noticed that the contacts were pretty dirty and so I sanded them down, which seemed to help. But then a few of them quickly became intermittent again. I looked at the price of new burners online and found them to be priced quite high, between $30 to $40 *each*. I also realized the receptacles that these coiled burners plug into, which cannot be cleaned, were the the more likely source of poor electrical contact. Those parts weren’t too expensive, about $10 each, so I bought a few of them and spliced them in to replace the ones that were very worn out. This helped quite a bit and we had all 4 elements working reliably for the first time in a long time.

A few months after that I was noticing that a burner wasn’t working, so I attempted to adjust it in the receptacle and when I turned it on, I heard the a very loud pop and saw a very large blue spark jump from the receptacle. I guess that’s what I get for not ‘doing it right the first time’ and just replacing all the receptacles and burners. After that spark, that burner position no longer worked because it evidently took out the switch/temperature controller in the panel. Later, I had an experience where the other small (6″) burner did something similar and this time the spark melted a section of the burner and it came apart near the receptacle. I resigned myself to getting 4 new burners and 2 more new receptacles. I didn’t realize at the time that I’d need two new switch/temperature controllers too.

If you price out a range by the sum of its replaceable parts, you’ll quickly realize that it can get expensive in a hurry. I found that the 4 burners and 2 more receptacles added up to over $160 and with a new stove costing around $500-600, it doesn’t make much sense spend a lot of money to fix one that is 17 years old. However, I found that the entire set of burners and receptacles were available in a kit (shown below) for $72 from the repairclinic.com and that put the cost of the repair within reason again. I wished I had seen that kit in the first place and I would not have tried to fix the range a burner at a time.
electric range surface element repair kit

It’s really not that hard to work on a range because it has a kind of hinge that lets you lift up the front just like a hood on a car. It even has a way to support the top with some wire supports while you work on it. The receptacles were easy to replace and so were the elements. You do have to be remove power because an electric range it has high voltages, so you should know where the circuit breaker is for the range and make sure to turn power off to the range when you’re about to touch anything that is electrical.

After I got the burners and receptacles replaced, I learned that the big blue sparks had damaged two of the switch/temperature controllers because I only measure 40 VAC (instead of 240 VAC) across their output so I had to replace two of those too. These parts were not very attractively priced on-line anywhere I looked, so I picked them up at the local appliance store.

Now the range is virtually new again and the pots actually sit flush on the burners which start up immediately with they are turned on. One of the more gratifying things about working on appliances is that you can become a total geek with your tools and multimeter and in the end, it results in a wife who is happy with the result :-). Very few geek adventures offer that as an incentive.

UPDATE: 2013-01-19 This repair has kept the stove running reliably for more than 5 years, and so I wanted to confirm that the fix saved us the cost of a new range and made it much more convenient to use, because we no longer worry about whether one of the burners was not heating. So if you want a stove that works like new, my recommendations is to just buy the repair kit and replace all of the burners and receptacles at once.

Whirlpool Washer Transmission Repair

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A few months ago our whirlpool washer wouldn’t spin. It did everything else, but it was pretty worthless without the spin function because the clothes would just be sitting at the bottom of it completely soaked after a wash. Of course, the first thing I did was go to Google and type in “Whirlpool washer won’t spin” and got a lot of hits on some great websites. Most of them were repair websites and forums sponsored by kind individuals who freely share their knowledge such as fixitnow.com. Others are sponsored by companies who sell parts to DIY homeowners, like repairclinic.com.

The forums always suggest the most common and easy fixes first, like the lid switch, which wasn’t my problem. So I had to start disassembling the washer because the next item on the list was the coupling on the motor. Fortunately, these websites have directions on how to get the washer open, which takes very little effort, as long as you know which screws to remove and in what order. I knew that the coupling was unlikely to be the failed item because the agitator was still working and it would be unlikely that a failed coupling would allow that to work. Then I started looking at the clutch/brake mechanism and that also looked OK. Finally, I figured it had to be the transmission, one of the hardest items to remove. I had the entire washer torn apart and moved to the kitchen because our laundry room is more of an alcove in the entryway between the garage and the kitchen.

After pulling the transmission, I was faced with the prospect of taking it apart, knowing it would be filled with heavy oil.

To pull your washer’s transmission, you need to remove a bolt at the top of the shaft holding it to the agitator. To expose that bolt, you have to pull off the plastic cap on the top of agitator as well as another translucent seal below it. Note the translucent cap has an o-ring seal on it. Make sure to put it back in properly when you re-assemble the washer to keep water out of that bolt’s compartment or it will rust and fuse with the shaft.

I carefully took out all the screws holding on the transmission’s top cover and drained the oil into a jar. This was going to a really messy job and so I put on some vinyl mechanics gloves.

Whirlpool washer Transmission image

I was amazed at the complexity of the transmission. It has to perform several functions, all without any input other than the direction the motor. For instance, it has to agitate, spin, and also go into neutral without any shifters or solenoids. The same motor is simultaneously running the pump from a portion of the drive shaft that comes out the other end. The transmission uses a rather complex plate of pawls, gears, and cams on something called the ‘rack retainer’. I was trying to simulate spinning the motor forward and backward and thus I could shift it from spin mode to agitate mode, but I couldn’t get it into spin. It was then that I realized that something called a ‘shoulder pawl stud’ was broken off at its threads and the rack retainer was spinning freely. This pawl stud works as an axle and also as a way of getting the plate to spin along with the spin gear, but it was broken with its threads embedded in the main gear. So I had to find a new pawl stud and figure out a way to extract the threads from the hole they were in. I was pretty sure that the threads had some locking compound on them and they weren’t going to come out easily.

Whirlpool washer Transmission inside image

The pawl stud wasn’t available as a separate part, but there was something called the Neutral Drain Pack from Repairclinic.com which included a lot of parts, including 2 different studs, since Whirlpool evidently beefed up the threads for the newer models, no doubt because it was a weak point. The upside to that is that if I ruined the threads extracting the broken stud, I could drill and tap it for the larger stud and newer rack retainer. So as my wife headed off to the laundry mat with a load of wash, I order the parts on line. The neutral drain kit was about $17 + $6 shipping. In the meantime, I tried to drill the screw threads out of the main drive gear. I broke a drill bit doing it, but got enough of a hole down through the middle of the broken screw shaft that I thought I’d have success with an ‘easy out’. I took it into work and borrowed an easy out and with the help of an arbor press to apply pressure to the easy out, I extracted the broken screw without doing any damage to the threads.

A few days later, the parts arrived. The kit contained a lot more parts than I needed. I replaced all the old parts with new ones, figuring after 15 years of service, there was no point in reassembling things with old parts when I had new ones right there. Getting everything back together required some head scratching, but after thinking it through, I was able to manually operate the transmission and check the agitate and neutral modes.

After a little fiddling everything went back together and I ran a cycle through without clothes and was very happy when the spin mode began working again. Now it’s been working for a few years, I figured that the $23 and my time was worth it because if I had a repairman do it, I’m sure it would have been over $300 because he would have likely replaced the whole transmission. That would be beyond the value of the washer. It was also better than throwing it away and buying a new one for somewhere between $600-900. I generally don’t fix things myself just for the savings because if you consider my time, it’s not really saving me that much. I do it more for the educational experience and the satisfaction of knowing that if it ever breaks again, I can choose to either fix it myself or buy a new one, if we think it’s time for its retirement.

I’ve included the meager set of instructions for the Neutral Drain Pack in pdf format here.

UPDATE: 2009-01-07 I continue to get comments and emails on this posting. I just got one asking about getting the transmission apart and so I’ve uploaded a new picture that shows what a messy job this is. Click on it for a higher resolution image.

image of the opened whirlpool washer transmission

The snap ring (shown next to the screw driver laying on the newspaper) needs to be removed from the shaft to get the top cover off of it. I can’t recall if I had the proper snap ring pliers or if I used needle nose pliers ‘in reverse’ to spread open the snap ring by its holes. I managed to save all the oil and reuse it afterward, but if you lose some or it looks dirty you can get more from an appliance service center or use SAE 90 weight gear oil if you can’t find a service center.

There is also the possibility that your washer is caked with mud, so if the basket won’t spin, it may be clutch that is worn or can’t overcome the friction of mud caked between the basket and the tub like the image below:

whirlpool washer basket and tub

This photo was sent to me by a reader who found mud stuck between the basket and tub. His washer wouldn’t spin because the clutch couldn’t overcome the friction caused by the mud. If your spin cycle is intermittent, then this could be the potential cause of it.

Another resource you may find useful if you’ve gotten this far is this .pdf file for the service manual for a Whirlpool direct drive washer. It’s got the schematics, troubleshooting instructions, parts list, etc., for the whirlpool washer.