Hoover WE140 Washer / Drier

I have a Hoover WE140 Washer / Drier, and for the past few months, it has not been drying. I’ve eventually gotten round to taking off the lid and having a look.

The most obvious conclusion to jump to is that the drier doesn’t work because the Element has broken. Apparently, this is not often the case!

The washer / drier has three heating elements inside - the first is to heat the water during the washing cycles (this is located down under the drum). The other two are for the drying cycles (for 2 different heat levels, I presume).

Under the lid, you can see the top of the two heating elements (called upper and lower). There are also three thermostats on the top, two with a little peg on them (2 and 3), and one without (1).

Thermostat 2 is connected to Live, and the other end is connected to one of the heating elements.

Thermostat 3 is connected to Neutral, and the other end is connected to the other heating element.

These two thermostats are normally closed, and I presume become open circuit when a maximum temperature is reached.

The other thermostat (1) is supposed to be normally closed, and only goes open when over-temperature is reached.

The first thing I did was to turn off the power, and measure the resistances of the heating elements and the three thermostats.

The heating elements had a low resistance and were not open circuit, so I presumed that these were fine.

Thermostats 2 and 3 were closed, and thermostat 1 was open.

From this, I deduced that thermostat 1 had failed - but why?

I had a problem quite a while ago, where the water inlet valves were not closing off. Until I realised this, I had been running the drier for longer and longer to get the clothes dry.

I have noticed that Hoover have released some new thermostats, to take into consideration lengthy repeated drying cycles, which were causing many dryers to trip.

In replacing the inlet valve, I believe I have fixed the cause, however I have ordered a complete suite of three thermostats to fix the symptom (broken thermostat 1), and reduce the possibility of this happening again in the future!

Dreambox 7025 Timer Edit Bug

With the DM7025, you can add a timer through the TV by selecting the ‘info’ button when watching a programme. Once this is stored, if you go to the web server, and try to edit it, you get the error message: “Please only use the characters …. in the name and description field”. You get this message even if the name & description field appear to have valid characters.

This appears to be due to the add timer mechanism through the TV puts invalid characters into the recording entry - these characters look like spaces in the web edit page, but are not actually spaces.

I suspect that these characters are unicode control characters.

The answer, therefore, is to replace anything that ‘look like a space’ with a space.