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I was washing a large down comforter in my washing machine and I noticed that the machine was shaking during the spin cycle. I let it go for about 10 minutes and decided to just turn it off, but when I went back out there was water leaking onto the floor (luckily this was outside) and it had just stopped running. The dryer is plugged into the same outlet.

When I have them both plugged in and I hit the reset button it causes the washer to fill with water for about one second and immediately shut off. The dryer won't work at all. When I only have the dryer plugged in the dryer runs fine. So what is wrong with the washer? Can someone help me understand where to go from here?

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The shaking probably shook a wire loose besides causing a leak, or the leak flooded over a set of wires and shorted the wire to the casing. The GFCI did its job by detecting the current to ground and shutting down the power. Reconnecting with the fault in place will cause the GFCI to trip again.

The dryer is protected by the same GFCI so when it trips the GFCI will shut down all power.

Get someone qualified to inspect it and be prepared to shell out for a new washing machine should it be irreparable.

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  • +1. If you have to ask the question, you shouldn't be the one trying to find the failure and should get some on-site help. That doesn't necessarily have to be a pro, if you aren't worried about preserving the warranty and can find someone you Really Trust ... but you need someone working on it who is comfortable with house current, is comfortable disconnecting and reconnecting parts of the machine's circuitry, and is comfortable working their way through a machine to isolate the failure point.
    – keshlam
    Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 1:09
  • I appreciate your swift answer friend, thank you very much I'll have it looked at.
    – Alec Brososky
    Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 2:06
  • @keshlam a leak caused by harsh shaking may have other defects like broken bearings and failed suspension
    – ratchet freak
    Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 13:38
  • @ratchetfreak: Good point. But unless you can get failure codes out of the control system, I'm not sure that gets us a lot farther forward. (Of course I'm an EE, not ME, so I may be overly narrowly focused.)
    – keshlam
    Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 14:34

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