What beach sand actually does to a washing machine

A woman in Warilla rang me about a five-year-old front loader that had started leaking a little from the door. Small puddle, only on the bigger loads, nothing dramatic.

The gasket had a groove worn into it at the bottom, which is not unusual. What was unusual came out of the pump filter while I was down there anyway: maybe a third of a cup of sand. Not lint, not hair, not the usual coins and hair clips. Sand, wet and heavy, packed into the housing like it had been poured in.

Three kids in nippers, she said, and a husband who surfs. I've stopped being surprised by it.

The bit people get wrong about filters

Most people assume the pump filter is there to catch this sort of thing, and that if the filter is clean the machine is fine. It isn't quite how it works.

The filter catches things that float or tumble. Sand doesn't do either. It sinks, and it goes wherever the water goes, which means it gets pulled through the pump before it ever reaches anything that could stop it. Some of it settles in the outer tub and stays there. Some of it works into the door seal. And a good amount of it goes straight past the impeller, scoring the pump housing on the way through.

Which means the sand you can see in the filter is the fraction that got caught on its way somewhere else. The rest of it has already been through the machine, at speed, over and over, for as long as you've been washing beach gear in it.

Where it ends up

Four places, and they fail in a fairly predictable order.

The pump goes first, because it's the only part that has abrasive material driven through it at speed. It doesn't stop dead. It gets less efficient, takes longer to clear the tub, and eventually can't finish a drain inside the time the machine allows it.

Then the door seal. Sand collects in the fold at the bottom of the gasket, sits there wet between washes, and grinds a groove in the rubber every time the drum turns. A gasket that's worn through at the six o'clock position on a machine that's otherwise sound is nearly always this.

Then the drain hose and the standpipe, which silt up gradually the way a creek bend does. This one is slow and you won't notice it until the machine starts throwing a drain error.

Last, and this is the expensive one, the tub bearings. Sand that gets past the tub seal is game over for the bearing behind it, and on a lot of modern front loaders the tub is a sealed assembly, so the repair is the whole tub. I've written about where a repair stops making sense — a sealed-tub bearing job is at the top of that list.

What to do about it before you wash

The whole problem is solved outside the laundry, which is annoying advice but it's the true version.

Hose the gear down before it comes inside. Wetsuits, boardies, rashies, towels, nippers uniforms, the lot. A proper hose-off outside in a tub, not a rinse in the laundry sink where the sand just goes down a drain that shares a wall with your machine.

Shake towels out on the grass. A beach towel holds a surprising amount and it drops most of it if you give it a solid flick.

If something is genuinely sandy and you're going to wash it anyway, run a rinse-and-spin cycle on its own first, then wash it properly. Two short cycles move less sand through the pump than one full wash does, because the rinse-and-spin drains sooner and at a lower load.

And check your own pump filter every few months if you're near the water. Front loaders have it behind a flap at the bottom front. Towel down, shallow tray, unscrew it slowly. If sand comes out, it's been going through the pump too.

The top loader version

Top loaders hide it better, which isn't the same as handling it better.

Most of them have no accessible filter at all, so there's nothing to open and nothing to find. The sand collects in the bottom of the outer tub, outside the drum you can see into, and it stays there.

The tell is in the washing rather than the machine. Grey grit in the cuffs and seams of dark clothes after a wash, or a faint sandiness on sheets that were clean going in, means the tub has a reservoir of it that the fill water is stirring up every cycle. People usually blame the detergent. It isn't the detergent.

If you want to check, run an empty hot cycle with nothing in it and look at the water in the bottom of the drum right at the end of the drain, before it finishes. Sandy water means sandy tub. CHOICE has decent background on the different machine types if you're deciding what to replace one with.

Is it too late?

If sand is coming out of the filter, the pump has already had years of it going through. That's not a disaster on its own. A drain pump is a modest part, it's accessible on most machines from the front or the base, and swapping one on a sound machine is a straightforward job.

What I'd want to know is whether it's still arriving. Clean the filter out completely, note the date, and look again in a month of ordinary washing. An empty filter means you've fixed the supply and you're only dealing with the damage already done. A filter that's silted up again in four weeks means the beach gear is still going in the machine, and replacing a pump now just buys another one the same job in two years.

I'm through Warilla, Barrack Heights and the Shellharbour beach streets constantly, and this is one of the two or three faults I'd say is genuinely more common here than three kilometres inland.

The assessment fee is $125, it's payable on the visit, and you get the repair price before anything is touched. Book it in or ring 02 4229 3777 and I'll tell you over the phone whether it's worth me coming out.