I cannot repair my washing machine without documentation. I have no idea how to use my multimeter to check the components. There are parts dealers for Beko in my area, but none of them have the service manual.
The parts shops all say go to the website for the manual as a flippant off-the-cuff answer. There are no service manuals on the Beko website – at least not for my model. The navigation of the Beko website does not even have a path to docs. And worse, my model is treated as non-existent by the website.
What would I do if I were a professional repair service? What is the official channel?
I am open to “piracy¹” but it would be a long shot to scour all the dark web for a manual for a specific washing machine. It’s not the type of content people have a strong interest in spreading/trading.
¹As RMS says, it’s not a just term for it but sharing is awkward too.
Most appliances just have the main parts available for replacement, rather than the individual components. You would just change the main board rather than replace a resistor, for example.
If you don’t know how to find the broken component on a board, that’s not something that the service manual would help you with either. There’s too much of a risk of someone hurting themselves for the washing machine companies to go to that level of detail.
At that point you would need to figure out which part is broken and either replace the whole thing, or take it to a repair shop, but that would probably cost more than buying the whole part as a replacement.
I’m far from trying to track down the atomic component. I need to get an idea of what is failing. There should be readings I can take with the multimeter to see whether the motor is bad, or the controller for the motor, or something else. I’m not bothered at this point whether I can fix whatever part is broken. I might be fine with replacing a whole part. But I need to get there. I need to know which part is failing.
Ah, I misunderstood. When you were talking about a multimeter, I thought you meant that you wanted to replace individual components.
It might be worth posting on one of the DIY communities and describing the symptoms and any error codes. Even though you’re unlikely to find someone with the same model, washing machines are all fairly similar, so you might be able to narrow it down to the likely part 🙂
I wish I had an error code but when it faults out it just gives a non-stop steady blinking LED. No variation that would indicated an error code.
Multimeters can be used to simply find out if a part is working. I recently used it when I lost hot water. By reading the voltage of the flow sensor, it was clear that the flow sensor bad (water running should give voltage X and still water should give voltage Y). I’m not sure how many such opportunities there are with washing machines though.