The $43 bearing and the $390 tub
Sooner or later a lot of front-loading washers start to roar when they spin, and a common reason is one small part at the back of the tub: a bearing.
On one washer sold in America today, the manufacturer will sell you that bearing on its own, for forty-three dollars. F3
On another, the manufacturer only sells the bearing already pressed into the back half of the tub F40, and that piece costs three hundred and ninety dollars at The Home Depot's parts store. F30
Same noise, same small part, and about nine times the price. F3 F30 The difference sits in what the company that made your washer will sell you, not in the metal.
By the end of this you will know three washers where the maker only sells the big part, three where it still sells the small one, and the one search to run before you buy.
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One more thing before we start.
The small part that decides the bill
To see why one small part matters so much, picture what is spinning. The drum you load your clothes into sits inside a second, larger tub that holds the water.
The drum is fixed to a shaft that comes out through the back of that outer tub, and the shaft turns on bearings. LG's own parts store describes its rear bearing exactly that way: it supports the spin basket shaft at the tub, on the rear side of the washtub. F3
Next to the bearings sits a rubber seal whose only job is to keep the wash water away from them. When that seal wears out, water gets into the bearing, the bearing rusts, and the spin cycle starts to sound like a small airplane taking off in your laundry room.
The bearing and the seal are cheap pieces of metal and rubber. The question that decides your bill is whether anybody will sell them to you on their own.
That question matters more than it sounds, because of how long these machines are supposed to last. When the Department of Energy wrote its latest efficiency rules for home washers in 2024, it put the average lifetime of a residential clothes washer at thirteen point four years. F39
A home repair magazine, Family Handyman, gives a much shorter figure, five to seven years, without saying where it comes from. F28 The official number is the one I trust, and it is close to double.
So picture a washer that is meant to run for thirteen years and starts roaring in year seven or eight. Whether that is a weekend repair or a trip to the appliance store depends on one thing: which part you are allowed to buy.
Avoid: the Whirlpool Duet family
The first washer on the avoid side is the Whirlpool Duet family of front-loaders, sold under the Whirlpool, Maytag and Kenmore names.
When the bearing goes, the genuine part Whirlpool sells is the rear outer tub, part number W10772617. One authorized parts dealer describes it as the main housing that holds the drum bearings, to be replaced when the bearings are worn and cannot be serviced. F40
And the price depends on where you look. The Home Depot's repair parts store lists it at three hundred and eighty-nine dollars and sixty-eight cents. F30 Parts Town, at three hundred and seventy-one ninety-five. F41 AppliancePartsPros, at five hundred and eight dollars and twenty-nine cents. F40 The cheapest I found was three hundred and twenty-seven, on sale. F31
Here is the strange part. The Duet tub is not sealed. A repair write-up with photographs of the teardown shows the outer tub built in two halves bolted together, split apart to reach the drum and the bearings inside. F7
The bearings in that teardown are ordinary sizes, a 6205 on the outside and a 6206 on the inside. F7 And bearing and seal kits made for this family of Whirlpool and Maytag front-loaders are sold on their own by other companies. F6 One I checked was listed at around twenty dollars. F38
So the small part exists. It just does not come from Whirlpool. If you want the genuine part, you are buying half a tub.
Avoid: Frigidaire and Electrolux
The second is the front-loader built by Electrolux and sold as Frigidaire, Electrolux, and some Kenmore models. Its rear outer tub is part number one three one five two five five zero zero. F33
The listing says it plainly: the tub assembly includes the bearing and the shaft seal, which are not sold separately. F33 The price on the day I checked was three hundred and sixty-seven dollars and ninety-nine cents, marked down from four hundred and twenty-seven ninety-nine. F33
And again, the repair market has an answer the maker does not. A kit made for that exact tub, with a front bearing, a rear bearing and a seal, sells for seventy-nine dollars and ninety-five cents, with Japanese Nachi bearings. F42
A fair warning about those kits. They are not made by the company that built your washer, and the job means taking the whole machine apart and pressing the old bearings out of the tub. It is a real repair, for a repair shop or a very patient owner.
But it is a very different bill from half a tub plus the labor to fit it.
Avoid: LG top-loaders without an agitator
The third washer on the avoid side comes from a company that also appears on the good side of this list, and that is the point.
LG's high-efficiency top-loaders without an agitator, models like the WT7000CW and the WT8200CW, use a replacement part LG calls the tub assembly drum. F34 On LG's own parts store that part costs six hundred and fifty-six dollars and ninety-five cents. F34
That is the most expensive single part in everything I checked for this episode.
I went looking for a bearing sold on its own for those two models, and I did not find one. I am not going to tell you it cannot exist. I am telling you that the part the manufacturer offers is the whole tub and drum, and that is the price you will be quoted.
I want to be fair about all three. Nobody has shown me that any of these was designed to break. The Federal Trade Commission, in its 2021 report to Congress on repair restrictions, says in so many words that it does not get into planned obsolescence, the idea that products are designed to fail on purpose. F20
So I will not tell you why a company sells only the big part. I will tell you what it costs you when you need the small one.
Buy: three that still sell the bearing
Now the other side. Here are three washers where, when the bearing goes, the company that made the machine will still sell you the bearing.
The first is the same company again. LG's front-loading washers, models like the WM3400CW and the WM3600HWA, take a rear tub bearing with the part number MAP61913707. F37
LG sells that bearing on its own through its parts store for forty-two dollars and ninety-five cents. F3 An authorized parts dealer, Parts Town, lists the same part at exactly the same price. F37
So one company makes a top-loader where the answer is six hundred and fifty-seven dollars, and a front-loader where the answer is forty-three. F34 F3 That is the whole lesson of this episode in one brand: read the model, not the logo. If you own an LG, the model number on the sticker tells you which of the two machines you actually have, and that sticker matters more than the badge on the front.
The second is Samsung, and it shows why you have to look at both parts. Samsung sells the front outer tub of some of its washers as a complete assembly, at one hundred and seventy dollars and ninety-nine cents. F1
But Samsung also sells a tub bearing on its own, for eighty-three dollars and ninety-five cents, as a genuine replacement part. F2 The big part exists, and so does the small one, and both come from the maker. That is the difference that matters.
On the same side of the line, General Electric sells a tub bearing for some of its washers as a genuine standalone part as well. F5 It is worth knowing if you already own one.
The third is the one that keeps coming up here: Speed Queen, built by Alliance Laundry Systems in Ripon, Wisconsin, a company that says it has a hundred and fifteen years of commercial laundry behind it. F29
Speed Queen's top-loaders are built the old way, around a mechanical transmission, and the parts catalogue shows what that means in practice. An upper bearing housing sells for forty-seven dollars and seventy-nine cents. A clutch assembly, forty-two dollars and fifteen cents. A tub cover gasket, sixteen dollars and thirty-six cents. F36
The expensive part does exist. A complete transmission is six hundred and ninety dollars and sixteen cents. F36 The point is that you are not forced to buy it when a bearing or a clutch is the thing that failed.
The warranty tells you how the company thinks about it. On its TC5 top-loader, Speed Queen covers the transmission for fifteen years, with parts only from year six on. F10 On its TR7, it covers the rest of the machine, parts and labor, for seven years. F12 And it says it tests its machines to ten thousand four hundred cycles, which it describes as roughly twenty-five years of life in an average household. F15
One fair warning. If a Speed Queen is used commercially, in a laundromat or a shared laundry room, that warranty drops to three years, parts only. F14
And the owners seem to agree. In Consumer Reports' reliability survey, covering close to seventy-five thousand washers bought between 2014 and 2024, Speed Queen came first for top-loaders with an agitator and second for front-loaders. F26 LG came first for front-loaders. F26
What the law asks for
So why is any of this allowed? Because nothing in American law says the small part has to be for sale.
In 2021 the Federal Trade Commission sent Congress a report called Nixing the Fix. F19 Among the ways manufacturers limit repair, it listed product designs that complicate or prevent repair, and the unavailability of parts and repair information. F19 And it said there was scant evidence to support the manufacturers' reasons for those restrictions. F22
Europe went further. The same report points out that the European Union now requires manufacturers to keep spare parts for household washing machines available for at least ten years. F21 Some of those parts can be reserved for professional repairers rather than owners, but they have to exist. F21
A few American states have started to act. California's Right to Repair Act covers appliances, and for a product that costs a hundred dollars or more it requires the maker to keep parts, tools and documentation available for at least seven years after it stops making the model. F24 For cheaper products, between fifty and a hundred dollars, the minimum is three years. F24 Minnesota's Digital Fair Repair Act, in force since July 2024, names washing machines among the products it covers. F25 Under that law, manufacturers have to make repair tools and manuals available within sixty days. F25
But read what those laws ask for, and you will see the gap. As far as I can read them, they ask for parts. They do not say how small the part has to be. A three hundred and ninety dollar tub with the bearings inside it is still a part. F30
The one search before you buy
So here is how I would use all of this in the store.
Before you buy a washer, take the exact model number, not the brand, and search the manufacturer's parts store for that model and the words tub bearing.
If the bearing comes up as its own part, like the forty-three dollar bearing on the LG front-loaders, the small repair exists and the maker stands behind it. F3 If the only thing that comes up is a rear tub with the bearing included, like the Whirlpool part at three hundred and ninety dollars, then you know today what year eight is going to cost. F30
And if you already own one of those, search the tub part number with the words bearing kit before you give up on it. For the Frigidaire tub, that search turns a three hundred and sixty-eight dollar part into an eighty dollar kit. F33 F42
It takes two minutes, and on a machine that is supposed to last thirteen years, it is the most useful two minutes of the whole purchase. F39
If you are buying from a dealer, ask them the same question out loud: when the bearing goes on this one, what do you order? A good dealer knows the answer, and the way they answer it tells you a lot.
One last habit that costs nothing. When the new washer arrives, find the model number, look up the tub part and the bearing part while the machine still works, and write both numbers on a strip of tape inside the lid. The day it starts to roar, you will already know which of the two bills you are facing.
Does your washer's maker sell the bearing?
If you have a washer at home right now, look up its model number tonight and tell me in the comments whether the maker sells the bearing on its own.
I would like to know how many of the machines people actually own still come with the small part. And if you found a kit from another company instead, tell me that too, with what it cost you.
Next time, a different kind of American brand: Revell, the model kit maker, and what happened to it.
Subscribe if you want that one, and I will see you tomorrow.