I have two Beko washing machines, both of which are trapped in an error state despite all components functioning.

Protectionism puts service manuals out of reach. I happen to have two service manuals that were leaked to me (against Beko’s will). One of the most important pieces of information for repair is clearing the error state (thus the most important info to suppress if you want to prevent repair and force a new purchase).

• machine 1 (WMD 2625t) service manual: “After entering the failure code observing mode, pressing and holding “Run/ Pause/Cancel” button for a short time will erase the error code from the memory.”
• machine 2 (WMB 51420) service manual: “Even if a new program has been started, this error code in here will not be cleared; the last error code occurred will always be displayed here. … When a new program is started, the error on the machine is cleared and the error code is no more displayed when Speed and YF1 keys are pressed.”

The machine 2 guide is self contradictory. Can we escape the error state or not? I hold “start” while rotating from OFF to COTTON (the 1st program). It shows error code 18, which means “unbalanced load” (yet there is no load). The service manual implies that programs can run when it’s in an error state, which seems unlikely and bizarre. It refuses to run programs in my case. In any case, there are no functional instructions for clearing the error state in the service manual.

The machine 1 service guide lies. Pressing and holding “Run/Pause/Cancel” while the error code is indicated has no effect. It’s forever stuck on error code 101 (E5), which also seems unlikely because the drain pump is fine (tested by hot-wiring).

Is Beko diliberately concealing the real/effective way to escape error states perhaps on the basis that the service manuals get leaked? Is the secret verbally given to Beko repairers in training instead?

It’s also suspicious that many of the fault flow diagrams lead to “replace controller card”. I really doubt PCBs would go bad in so many situations. Seems like a combination of laziness on the repair procedure to maybe sell more PCBs, which seem to have a high markup and also have an artificially short supply to force whole machine replacement.

I’m mostly confident that I have the right manuals, but it’s a shitshow because for machine 1 (WMD 2625t) there is a RAR file for a hodgepodge of models in the same family. And the svc manual for machine 2 is actually for “B7S B7SLED xxxx d/d”, which is apparently the US version of the WMB 51420.