Sometimes I am doing up to 6 loads of laundry in a single day – hello parenthood – and last week our 15+ year old Miele started doing the serious flash two red lights and cease all operation until seen by a qualified service engineer diagnostic.

But that’s not going to happen for a machine of such age, so this is on me to try and repair.

As luck would have it there’s a guy with the same model and the same diagnostic who posted a few videos to youtube regarding how to crack the machine open and diagnose this (internal flooding) fault, and how it happened for him.

Long story short: I seem to have had the same happen – some failure of the gasket/sleeve which routes the water from the soap dispenser to the drum. I’ve obtained a replacement from Ebay, but taking the washer out of action is a huge pain and will need to be scheduled. And there’s also a second gasket on the bottom of the drum which might be responsible.

Therefore, this: I bought a Sealey Ak47 Oil Suction Syringe on Amazon and designed/3D-printed a floor-standing sump-drain tip (see above CAD design) which latter can sit in the bottom of the machine. The syringe pipe (happy coincidence) is exactly the right diameter to run through a hole in front faceplate. So now I have a permanently installed sump drain in this rather rickety old machine, and I can use this to (a) confirm that the leak into the sump occurs during the filling, not spinning, cycle (update: now confirmed) and (b) to keep it running until we have time to swap the broken gasket/hose for the replacement one.