Inside a Washing Machine Motor: Explanation, Pinout, Teardown AND Experiments 

As a Miele technician for 30 years I can tell you guys that these motors are 30 years old and the Identical motors are still made and used in the Miele machines made today , I have never seen bearing failure but I have seen the amatures fail from being worn down to a nub.... These motors are SUPER reliable.. I have gone to many of these machines for service and have replaced motor brushes up to 3 times on the same machine over a 20 to 30 year life of the machine.

After having a motor exactly like this on the shelf for more than 15 years, today I managed to make it run thanks to your very instructive video. Thanks.

I've had 3 Miele washing machine motors sitting in my shed gathering dust because I didn't understand the wiring layout. As a complete novice I watched this video and 2hrs later I now have 3 working motors and from tomorrow I'll be making a wire wheel polisher I've been wanting for a longtime. Thank you for taking the time to record, edit, upload and share this video. You deserve all the hits you've had and more. Best wishes and thank you again 👍🍀😁

The quality and amount of thought that this man puts into his work is Amazing, great videos, thank you for making them.

The best video ever. I can tell you spent a lot of time studying these and preparing this video. Good job, it's very informative and i'll be sure to use this as reference if I ever get to work on such motors!

I mentioned a lot of my older videos in this epsiode. Here is a list with links: Teardown of a Siemens Washing Machine: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-H_JV7jTH4wU.html Reusing Washing Machine Motors (Thyristor Circuit): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-tUQg2WiHpUY.html Ducted Propeller with Washing Machine Motor: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-KTZ9PB3l3jI.html Video about the Power Grid: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OBYzvkY2-eA.html Video about the Isolation Transformer: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_pEmpvcNmXg.html Video about the Lab Power Supply: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-J3N6RX_wAJg.html

Sie sind eine Top Bereicherung für Technikinteressierte und die auch Dinge gern reparieren oder modifizieren. Danke für Ihren Job hier auf YT.

Now that is what I call a good teacher. Just watching the video make me feel like an expert. Old and wise enough not to act on that feeling, but thanks a lot.

Good Lord! Bought myself an old washing machine motor and stumbled upon this channel. This is all new to me - in fact: I have not the faintest clue with regard to motors, but I think I have come to just the right place here. That leads to a *new subscriber* .

I am an EE, and I must congratulate you on your clarity of explanation. Anybody, who has no prior knowledge of these motors who pays attention, should walk away from this video, at least roughly, understanding how the work. A clear and concise explanation is a rare thing these days! Well done ! Paddy

this is probably the most useful electric motor video ever published on youtube. I was sick of other people's stupid 2D diagrams with blue and red colors drawn is MS Paint. The iron powder trapped in the 3D magnetic field is the best visualisation ever my eyes deserved.

Ein grossartiger Beitrag. Das Thema ist super aufbereitet. Gut verständlich, detailliert und technisch toll umgesetzt. Vielen Dank für so viel Engagement.

My dad used to work for Siemens. It's so cool how many kinds of products they have and sell from washing machines to electrical panels. After he left Siemens, the company didn't want any panels back so we have about over $1000 worth of Siemens equipment left.

Interesting video. I've been working on a Hotpoint washing machine today. It's motor was a 3 phase type. 5 pins, 2 for the tacho and 3 for the motor windings.

I found your videos after looking up how motors work for building an instrument, and despite coming out still not really understanding because I'm quite dim, I still watched the rest of them. You're clearly a great teacher, even if this student isn't the best learner. Good stuff, P.A.I.

Thank You for Posting these. Especially all the Work you do explaining everything. I really learned a lot of new things. I Really Appreciate it. I hope you and your Family are all doing Great. Thanks again from Texas.👍❤️

This has to be the best and simplest explanation of an electric motor that I have ever seen. You have a new subscriber.

Brilliant work. This should be the method of teaching in every college. You added a follower.

Maaan, I wish you can make a 10 video playlist just on electric motors with an in depth examples. Thank you so much for explaining this to us!! 💪🏼🙏🏻❤️👍🏻🤓

Truly excellent video! I came looking for basic information to diagnose my washing machine motor and I went away with a well rounded education on the subject... Clarity, thoroughness and excellent presentation skills/style. Thank you for this very helpful and excellent work.

Great demonstrations and breakdown/explanation of the inner working of the motors

It is great that you include the German words for the technical terms. Thanks for taking the time to make this great educational video.

This video was so useful to me. Particularly helpful was finding out the parallel configuration is known as a 'shunt' type motor. I am trying to use one of these as a generator and this is apparently how it must be wound to work in this way. Knowing about the potential risk to the coils melting was also a great heads up. Great production quality and quality of explanations/diagrams too. Thank you for this video and your channel.

Very elaborate and a well executed post on the subject. Hats off for taking so much time & effort to explain the fundas and the different variables involved and how they interact with one another. Thank you very much for covering the subject in such close detail.

Learning how to reuse these motors from an electrical point, can be as interesting as what you create with them.

Thank you for sharing with youtubers. Excellent presentation, full of details, knowledge, and real practical experiments. Keep up the good work. Your instructions and commentary are excellent, loud, and crystal clear. Thank you.

Thanks you for posting this video. Now i knows how washing machine motor works. Good explanation.

Absolutely brilliant video. So much effort has gone into sharing your knowledge. I have not seen it explained as clearly as this before.

I am glad you are back to one of your core fields of interest and expertise. Excellent work TPAI.

brilliant hands on simple to understand education. brings back what i learnt at uni many years ago. thks

Thank you! I love the idea of building an electric vehicle using these salvaged motors and other salvaged parts. I live in Germany as well and see a lot of useful parts lying around on the street every day. I'm gathering enough technical knowledge to put together the vehicle. Thank you again!

This is the best description of how universal motors work, that I have ever seen.

Very detailed explanation. A lot of work, thoughts and care behind the video. One of the best instructional videos on RU-vid. 2 thumbs up! Thank you!

Very clear explanation of basic dc motor working principle. Thank you!

At 9:12 I fully expected the motor to explode into many pieces. I was testing a shunt wound 15 hp motor once when one of the field supply wires became disconnected. Within a second or two, the motor accelerated to the point of destruction, sending heavy copper commutator parts up to the steel roof of the building. Luckily no one was injured. A dc motor using field weakening to run above it's base speed should always incorporate a field loss relay in the control circuit to shut down the drive in the event of field loss.

It will be nice to see you get a solution operational with AVR. You could then use PWM control in conjunction with a PID algorithm to vary speed. Controlling AC with PWM can be a bit more involved than DC, as it generally needs to be implemented with some sort of phase synchronisation.

Excellent and detailed information dealing with the Universal Motor.

21:44 no. the leftover magnetic field is so small that the torque of the motor wont be enough to overcome the friction of the brushes. the reason it runs when only powered trough the brushes is the way the rotor is wound. it generates its own magnetic field parallel to the magnetic flux lines the stator should have then closes it trough that same stator, so the stator is magnetized as if you powered its coils. in reality the stator coils are optional to the principle of operation of those motors and their purpose is to increase the power rating of the motor without making the rotor bulky. (its cheaper to have small rotor and stator coils than a bulky rotor). you can see this yourself by first exciting the stator coil in one direction, turning it off, seeing what direction the rotor would spin in then excite the stator in the other direction, turn it off and you would see the rotor doesnt care.

Brilliant video. One of these would make an excellent spindle for a small mill and the independent windings would be ideal for CNC control.

The most educating 25 minutes of my life. Or at least today.

Excellent and very educational video! Thanks you very much!

This Motor was made for Machines up to 1200 rpm spinning, machines up to 1400 had a field-switching line, thats the pin „nc“ on your motor. Just for info. Or maybe an idea for another video, how to switch low and high rotations. Great job man 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

Love how thoroughly you explain everything! Keep up the great videos!

I agree with all those who wrote that this is the best video on this item !!! Thank you very much for your time and effort !!! God blesses you !!!

Just came across this channel I’m more then thankful for your knowledge, Oh and experience. This is taboo to me but so cool and interesting with this passion in re engendered applications using motors. This is for using any and every tool in a persons tool-bag purse

This is excellent... because I've finally got a WM motor... and I've got all of your excellent research here to help me get it working.

As soon as the apocalypse hits, i will move next door to this guy. We will be neighbors. A good neighbor to have. LOL

Fascinating stuff and very well put together! Yesterday my boss walked in on me watching this video, and we then started talking about electric cars. Thanks!

An excellent technical video. I also applaud your precise command of the English accent and language, in fact I prefer it to many of my fellow British accents where the standard of English has deteriorated so badly especially over recent years. Very well done in every aspect of this fascinating video...Many Thanks...

Your contribution towards humanity is appreciated unfortunately my government here in Canada does not permit people like me to be able to handle any means of id in order to make transactions in order to buy or sell and even donate online and its very frustrating for the moment but things are going to change soon for all of us one way or another.

THe remanent magnetic field explaination was spot on. Crystal clear. thank you very much sir .

This is absolute excellence. Best instructional tutorial by far.

You explained it better than my electrical machinery professor!

Great explanation of electric motors. I have LG Direct Drive that has - if i remember correctly - ring with permanent magnets as rotor attached directly to the shaft and something like 30 or more radial coils as a stator. I guess it creates three or more phases to power some coils and it can use remaining coil to monitor actual position and switch phases when needed. It's very simple mechanical design (no moving parts except the drum) with somewhat more complicated electronics for monitoring position and creating likely three phase AC with variable frequency. I believe it can precisely control position and speed of the drum and estimate weight of the laundry just by swinging drum a bit and measuring current generated as it returns to original position.

I love the way you explain things, very practical and easy to follow

Excellent video! I loved the experiments you applied here to show how the motor works. Keep up the great work. Thank you.

Fantastic video. The demonstration of sep-ex control was very informative.

This is brilliant! I've always been frustrated by universal motors need for constant speed monitoring. I would really love to see a budget / more permanent option for two DC power supplies to get decent torque out of these abundant motors.

Whaoo, that was awesome. You are the best teacher, thank you very much. I have never got it so simple and clear like this before.

I like all of your videos but I like the ones about motors the most because it's not covered that well elsewhere and it's a very fascinating and much deeper topic than I realized.

Since you will control the windings (field and armature) separately, I think that by adding very thin wire to the field (with thinner wire but more winding to match the former amount of copper that was used there) will increase torque and reduce speed.

with pulsed dc, you can capture the back emf via a diode into a capacitor, and re-use the voltage as pulsed dc.

Very useful video. Like the others about this theme. I'm interested in this type os motors, and how to use it to other purposes than the original of it's fabrication. Continue with your great job!

If I remember it correctly, these kind/type of self-excited series motors are also used at electric trains because of the great powerful torque. Very dangerous motors without a load and/or speed control ;-)

Perfect explanation + experimental attitude! I've spent a lot of time studying my old washing m. but this video does enlighten my mind...

Das ist echt ein hammer video! Ich bin E techniker aber so geil und anschaulich hats noch keiner erklährt! Hat mir wirklich noch ein paar Fragen beantwortet!

You are talented in your explanation on AC DC brushed motors.

Respect,mate. I've learnt hips in fraction of time. All clear and understandable on my high school level of physics. Fantastic English for non-native. Many thanks.

I'd like to see you explore using it as a generator (using strong permanent magnets) which might be good for a wind generator. Or secondly you can combine this project to make an cargo eBike since you mentioned cargo bikes before :)

Ich schreibe eigentlich nie Kommentare. Aber die Erklärungen sind wirklich herausragend gut. Danke dafür.

wow, that's just totally awesome! thank you for explaining all this to us in a very easy understoudable manner, keep it up! Big thanks, again!

Well done! A generator produces maximum output Amps at around 1500-2000 RPM thus would be able to power the motor driving it!

Very interesting, much more informative than diagrams on a blackboard, which is how I was taught the principles of electric motors. Remember Maxwell?

Great video and real in-depth explanations of how motors operate.

Grateful teacher his explanation is very helpful for understanding, my best wishes

Yes you must have been a Electrical Engineer Professor Motors 101 EXCELLENT JOB Very professional Schematic and teaching , i think i now understand much more about those types of Motors THANK YOU Tim

Thanks in a million. Great content. Awesome. Very well explained. I couldn't find this explanation--simply put anywhere else. Great teachers are hard to find. Grade: A++💥

It would be interesting to know (measure) what is the maximum voltage and current of the field coil and armature coil before the iron goes into saturation. That would be a good base for the circuit control.

Brilliantly explained, thanks brother!

It would be exciting to make a 2-channel audio amplifier only from salvaged parts!

it always good to see TPAI back with his old time schedule of maker videos and THAT'S ALWAYS STAYS AWESOME....

Your dedication is just excellent, God bless you.

Two thumbs up! I can't wait to see your new approach to controlling the speed. I hope you provide an analog circuit for control as well as the arduino approach. It shouldn't be too difficult, right? Maybe the analog approach video should precede the digital control method. Although I see where this is going and it is others who would benefit... Cheers

just recently jeremy fielding put out a video with lots of information about how to wire motors. im also planning on controling such a motor. probably using an arduino and some beefy mosfets to regulate the voltage through the armature

Finally a good explanation for these moters. Now I can finally experiment myself on one of those moters.

Man, your videos are top notch...so glad I found your channel.

Fantastic video ...again. I found it interesting that 30 years ago they used Torx screws. I wonder what the technical reasoning behind that choice would be. It would certainly be expensive in comparison to even socket head/ Allen screws.

great video, I have one motor waiting for the solution to become useful. Thank you for your investigations, it helps a lot people like me with not much resources but interest into learning and reusing things. Waiting for your conclusions. Thanks again.

Wow, thank you very much for this great explanation of how a universal motor works and what you can do with it. This video is really valuable!

Fantastic! Pure Electrical Engineering..... THE BEST OF IT ALL!

Have you ever done any experiments with a compound configuration with 1/2 of the field in series with the armature and the other half in opposition to the first field with a variable resistance to reduce the magnetic influence of the fields without reducing the voltage to the point where the torque falls off so far that no useful work can be done? Theoretically the current increase in the series winding as the motor loads should cause the torque to increase as the loadf is applied. I would think with your shop facilities, you could do a serious and thorough analysis of this, and the Miele motor has easily accessible points to alter connection configurations. I really enjoy your approach and conclusions. They are concise, thorough and clearly presented. Two thumbs up.

Great video sir I learned a lot. I am currently studying to be an Automotive Technician and we are learning about electromagnets at the moment. Flemings Right hand rules etc. I would love to support you on patron but I am a poor student. I will support you once I am qualified though. Cheers!

I love your new setup. Your hard work really shows. Thanks again for the german language lessons.

Well done! I'll be digging out my collection of electric motors and trying to copy your experiments. Thanks!

Thanks for sharing this information with us.

Amazing how much I learnt from this video. Thank you so so much! 👌🏻

I learned more from this video than I initially hoped for. Very good video and very well explained. :) Subscribed...for sure!

Yes finally some way to use these things! Any progress on that simpler circuit? It would make life much easier for DIY tools.

HI G, Nice deconstruction. Keep going. regarding designing a motor driver, the ambiguity not yet addressed is the "right hand rule" which could be demonstrated with the compass and clearly define which way the armature is kicked. besides the demo, I suggests that an arduino controller should be AC at least part of the time (a hint for cleverness to be added) so direction can be controlled and if left in AC mode slip can be controlled. Again, nice visualization.

@11.00 The circuit is a "light bulb moment". Nice hands on explaining.