We bought the Sears Kenmore Elite He3t, and after a couple of years it began throwing F11 and DL codes, first on an intermittent basis and eventually on nearly every load.

My research showed many people solving this problem with a replacement of the control unit or replacing the relays inside of it. I also recently saw a post saying you need to resolder the connections to the control unit circuit board.

I have a slightly different theory which is that the problem is really due to excessive vibration making the serial/tach connector to the motor intermittent or electrically noisy. This is the two wire connector at the left rear of the board as you are looking down on top of the control unit. This results in an error code when the unit is spinning and vibrating.

The problem with the engineering and design of these washing machines was that they all vibrate excesssively unless they are sitting on a floor constructed of a ton or more of solid concrete.

The vibration eventually makes either the motor serial/tach connector (or possibly one of the five relays in the control unit) intermittent, and the machine begins to throw error codes.

My solution was to take three hefty rubber bands and shock mount the control unit so that it hangs from the three bands inside the washing machine. This requires removing 3 screws on the rear of the lid on the machine with a 7mm wrench, taking the lid off, and prying the control unit from the mounting tangs with a flat blade screwdriver. The rubber bands can be looped through the mounting ears of the control unit and the original steel mounting bracket. No other modification is required, and the relays will not need to be replaced, nor will the circuit board need to be removed or resoldered.

The DL (Door Locked error) code is only the result of the system shutting down with an F11 code and then discovering that the door is already locked in the restart attempt. People often make this problem worse by then yanking the door open and destroying the interlock system.

It is a pity that a one-cent connector and the cheap mounting scheme of the control unit is what kills the reliability of this otherwise very nice $1000 washing machine.

Have fun.

Thats called job security

I also wanted to mention, if your unit is vibrating excessively, you may want to try a quick visual inspection of the tub suspension system in this washing machine. Remove the kickplate 3 - 7mm screws at the bottom front, and with a flashlight visually inspect the four shock dampers on each of the four corners of the tub. Apparently they have no stops in the extended position, so it may be possible that one or more of them has come apart during an exceptionally violent spin cycle. They can be reassembled by simply twisting the ends out of the keepers, reassembling them and then reinstalling.

On the top, the tub is suspended by large springs. you can remove the top of the machine to inspect these by removing three 7mm screws from the back of the lid and then sliding the lid back and then up and off.


Have fun!

I have also attached an image of the repair. Hopefully this will save somebody some time and money.

Attached Thumbnails

 

And for those of us without super vision :0).


BTW, thank you very much for this post.

From

http://www.epinions.com/msg/sec_~forums/show_~threads/cat_id_~17/id_~5481/forum_id_~409/pp_~8#posts

Repairtech's fix worked for us. My husband replaced all of the relays. We opened them up and they were bright and shiny and seemed fine. He did notice that one of the solders on a relay on the right side of the board was a bit thin. That must have been the problem. We plugged everything back in and I washed 6 loads with no beating on the CCU or unplugging anything.I found a handy conversion chart online as the Omron relays are hard to find:

http://nte01.nteinc.com/nte/NTExRefS...f?opendatabase

I ordered from Moyer Electronics.

http://www.moyerelectronics.com

You can order as few as you need unlike some other sites which require you to order a minimum of a hundred.
They are very cheap and if you are going to re-solder, you might as well replace them on the off chance that they are bad.


As for complaining to Sears, they could care less. I went through 5 people before I got to the "right" one who asked me what I wanted them to do...my warranty was out. Very snide. Whirlpool was no better, as they pass the buck to Kenmore.

Thanks to repairtech my washer has been working for 3 months now with no problem.

Just make sure that you only try this if your machine is out of warranty, otherwise you will void it if you try to do any of your own repairs.

Good Luck.