Washing machine door seal

In detail

The door seal is a folded rubber ring closing the gap between door and drum, and its geometry is the whole story: the fold that makes it seal also makes a channel holding water after the cycle ends, with a closed door leaving nowhere to evaporate to. The measurement bears this out with unusual clarity. Sampling the top and the bottom of the same seal on the same machines, a study found the top carried on the order of a hundred colony-forming units per square centimetre while the bottom was among the significantly contaminated sites. Same rubber, same machine, same wash — the only variable that differs is whether water drains off it or collects in it. That is why the seal is a record of its own rather than a line in the appliance's description. Advice at the level of the machine produces an instruction to clean the seal; the component-level fact is that the top is close to clean and the bottom is where anything you do belongs. It is also why the intervention with a mechanism here is drying rather than disinfecting — and the study tested no treatment.

Related

• Washing machine door seal is commonly affected by Mould

Hacks and claims involving this

• A hot empty wash cleans the machine Unresolved
• Leaving the washing machine door open Plausible mechanism, untested in this application