Well-Charted Waters

Traditionally wash day is Monday. Starting this hugely onerous and labour intensive task on a Monday gave the best chance of having it washed, dried, aired and folded in time for Sunday, the day of clean clothes. It seems that having a cold supper on a Monday, based on leftovers from the Sunday roast, linked in to this, as there was no time for elaborate food preparation and cooking alongside the weekly wash.

For us, this week, wash day was Friday. Just as tedious, as it turned out, if not as labour intensive as expected. A text first thing promised the engineer's attendance between 11:20 and 14:20. A text back to confirm he had the right postcode eventually elicited a phone call from him a couple of hours later, just as we finished taking the heavy privacy door off its hinges. No, he had been to Coventry first thing and was heading over to our house, where he would find neither ourselves nor the washing machine. Before changing his destination he asked for more information about the fault. A thirty second description allowed him to diagnose that a new PCB would be required, a part he did not have and would have to order in. He didn't know how long it would take to arrive but in two weeks' time he would be on holiday for three weeks. He was confident it would not turn up in time for him to then arrange another appointment before that time. It seems he was the only Beko service engineer in the Midlands. With that, he hung up to go and arrange the part with the office.

An hour later he rang back again to let us know that the office had now told him that our machine would not be covered under the service agreement we had been sold as it was on a boat. This was accompanied by some mumbo jumbo about fluctuating power supplies that seemed rooted in the limitations of primitive 'modified sine wave' inverters installed on boats in ancient history. Relevant or not this hidden condition was clearly not to be overturned without a battle royal, probably through the medium of 'Watchdog' and certainly not in any immediate timescale. Our turn to hang up and regroup.

The first action, as it was already thirteen days since we had been mis-sold the service agreement, was to get on to Domestic & General, cancel that agreement and instruct our bank to cancel the Direct Debit. Beko wouldn't fix their own appliance so one option would be to engage a local repair company to do it. They would, of course, require a call-out fee with no guarantee of outcome. We spoke to a couple and one really helpful person explained that, while they could purchase a suitable PCB at a cost of approaching a hundred pounds, they do not come pre-programmed. The Beko engineer would have the necessary equipment etc. to programme it for the machine it was fitted in. In any case, that would address the immediate point of failure but possibly not any underlying cause. Further expense would be involved in trying to firstly identify and then rectify that issue or else the PCB might just blow again. Clearly this was not a good bet. The remaining option, then, was to scrap the machine and buy a new one to replace it.

Having now been at this for about three hours we embarked on the process of deciding what to replace it with. Most machines are a broadly standard size. In a kitchen they are pretty interchangeable. On the boat, however, millimetres matter, so the specifications of every candidate must be subjected to very close examination. Post-COVID we found that a lot of possible models were simply unavailable anyway. We considered top loaders, front loaders, small washtub versions for caravans and mobile homes and consulted the narrowboat forums for recommendations and experiences. Key features for selecting the defunct machine had been a load of 8 kg and a spin speed of 1600 rpm. However, during our several months aboard last year, we had found that we mainly washed quite small loads, quite often. Any bedlinen or towels, which would make larger loads far less frequently, would be hanging around drying for ages so we would tend to take those to a full scale laundrette in any case. Taking that into account we finally opted for a small Zanussi machine with a load of only 3 kg but a relatively fast spin speed of 1400 rpm. We could make something positive from the situation by virtue of the much smaller size of this machine. It would be simple to manoeuvre in and out of the space available, avoid the need to dismantle the boat if we ever needed to work on it and leave extra space around it that is always precious. Somehow smaller size always means a larger price tag but it was readily available for delivery from a range of suppliers. One other positive was that the original machine had been included in the overall price of the boat, so we could fool ourselves that we had not specifically paid for that one in the first place.

Several more hours having been consumed in market research and the order process, we replaced the door we hadn't needed to take off and repaired to the garden of The Greyhound for a well-earned drink.