This is a twenty year old washing machine. Today it wanted to quit. Its motor no longer turned. although the water pump still worked, so water was getting drained when the time was up.
I tried resetting the machine following the instructions found on YouTube: unplugged it, and then plugged it back in after one minute. Within 30 seconds after it was plugged back in, I opened and closed the lid six times, each time the magnetic switch clicked.
That did not help. So, I opened its front panel, and measured the voltages on the motor connector pins. I could not find a diagram for this washing machine online, but I did notice that the label on the motor says "115 V 60HZ 9.2/7.3A", so I knew that at least one of the pins on the connector should read 110 V.
None of the pins had 110 V. So, I knew that the motor was not getting adequate power. So I decided to trace the connection from the motor to the control panel.
After removing the control panel, I saw that there was a schematic diagram for this washing machine stored behind the control panel. Thanks, GE!
The diagram is too big to fix onto an 8 inch by 14 inch scanner surface. The following is the portion of the diagram on the motor connection:
The way GE marks the wire colors is that the first letter is the initial of the main color, and the second letter is the color of the stripe. For example, VW is a violet color wire with white stripe. RB is a red wire with a blue stripe. A wire with a solid color starts with the initial of the color, and then followed by the letter "X". For example, solid yellow would be YX, and solid red would be RX. "NX" is for solid navy blue. From this diagram, we can see that we should be getting 110 V on the navy wire "NX".
The navy blue wire goes to a relay, as one would expect. The relay looks like this:
Of course, we now need to test this relay and see if it is indeed causing the problem. In fact, broken connections on M1, M3, or M7 could all cause the motor not to get power.
I removed the control board from its plastic housing, think that I might have to remove this relay from the circuit board for testing. But it turned out to be much simpler than I thought: the solder around one of its pins were burned away, and the pin did not appear to have contact with the circuit board. So, I cleaned the pin and re-soldered the pin to the circuit board.
I reinstalled the control panel back onto the washing machine. It is now working fine.
