The Morning a Maytag Washer Start Button Led Me to a Toothbrush, a Taylor Freezer, and a Gas Stove

It was 6:47 on a Saturday morning in March 2024 when my phone pulled me out of a dream about invoices. On the other end was the engineering manager at a 140-room hotel. His voice had that tone that said he had already been awake for hours. The emergency log he read off was short: 'Maytag washer start button not working.'

I coordinate emergency repairs for commercial laundry and kitchen equipment. Eight years, 600+ urgent calls. Hotels, apartment buildings, laundromats, a few places that probably should not have been running commercial equipment. My typical Saturday goes like this: some understaffed property has a machine that breaks at the worst possible moment, and someone has to fix it before the next shift of guests checks in. That morning was different.

What started as a single problem ended as a four-appliance diagnostic session: a Maytag washer, a Taylor freezer, a commercial gas range, and one very out-of-place sonic electric toothbrush.

The Maytag washer start button not working - the surface story

The machine in the laundry room was a Maytag top load washer mtw5605rw. The hotel had four of them lined up against the back wall. Three were churning through loads of white sheets; the fourth sat dark and silent, a red error light blinking at the rate of about once per second.

The manager pressed start. Nothing. He pressed it again. Still nothing. Then he stepped back and looked at me with the exact expression of someone who has a hundred rooms to clean and one working washer short.

I asked him a question he probably thought was too simple: 'What happened right before it stopped?'

He did not know. So I pulled the error codes from the machine's control board. There it was: a drain fault. The washer was refusing to start a new cycle because the control logic thought there was still water in the tub. In that state, pressing the start button does nothing. It is not that the button is broken - it is that the machine has locked itself out on purpose.

He said 'the start button is broken.' What he meant was 'the washer won't start.' Those are not the same thing. In the diagnostic world, the difference matters.

I opened the drain pump filter, which is a little twist-cap door at the front bottom corner of the washer. The filter was clean enough, but behind it, wedged against the pump impeller, was a sonic electric toothbrush.

Not a travel-sized one. A full-size, dentist-brand, probably-had-a-two-week-charging-battery toothbrush. Somehow it ended up in a guest's sheet pocket, went through the wash, and found its way to the pump. It had wedged itself just right to stop the pump from spinning, which triggered the error code and made the start button seem dead.

I pulled it out, cleared the fault, and ran a test cycle. The Maytag washer start button worked again. The toothbrush went into a biohazard bag - or at least a ziplock bag - and the laundry room came back to life. The whole fix took maybe forty minutes, including the test cycle.

The Taylor freezer alarm was the side quest

As I was packing my tools, the engineering manager said the magic words: 'Since you're here, would you mind looking at one more thing?'

That sentence is dangerous in my line of work. One more thing is never actually one more thing. This time, it was a Taylor freezer in the banquet kitchen.

Taylor freezers are everywhere in hospitality, and they are solid units. But they also have loud alarms that go off when the temperature drifts a couple of degrees. This one had been beeping every few minutes since 4 AM. Of course the staff was nervous - a freezer alarm in a hotel kitchen can mean a walk-in full of expensive food is about to die.

I looked at the display. The temp was fine, sitting right at -10°F. But the alarm said something about high condenser temperature. I checked the condenser coil, which is usually behind a removable panel. It was covered in a layer of dust that looked like it had been collecting since the Obama administration.

I cleaned it, reset the alarm, and told the kitchen manager to put a 'clean the condenser' reminder on the calendar every six months. It is a twenty-minute job that costs nothing and prevents exactly this kind of middle-of-the-night panic. The Taylor freezer was not broken. It was just breathing hard.

And then: does a gas stove use electricity?

Right as I was shutting the panel on the freezer, a line cook walked over. His gas range in the banquet kitchen was not lighting. Someone in the back of the house had told him 'it's gas, so it should work even if the power goes out.' He wanted to know if that was true.

Short answer: no.

'Does a gas stove use electricity?' Yes - almost all modern ones do. The igniter needs electricity to spark, the oven controls need electricity to read the temperature, and the gas safety valve needs electricity to stay open. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (energy.gov), most gas cooking appliances rely on electricity for ignition and controls. If the power goes out, you might hear a few clicks and maybe see a tiny spark if you are lucky, but the burner will not light reliably and the oven will not operate at all.

In this case, the issue was a dirty igniter, not a power failure. I swapped it out in about fifteen minutes. The burner lit on the first try. The line cook walked away looking like he had just witnessed a magic trick.

What the sonic electric toothbrush taught me

Nobody questions a toothbrush in a drain pump once they have seen one. But that morning made me rethink my diagnostic process.

For years, when a customer called with a start button complaint, I would jump straight to the control board. The button itself? I would check it. The lid switch? Maybe. But I never started at the drain pump. I only believed in checking the pump first after this call - and after another call a few weeks later where a hotel was ready to replace a $250 control board because a coin had jammed a different pump the same way.

Still, I can tell you which mistake is more embarrassing: assuming a $200 control board is bad when a $1.50 piece of plastic is blocking the pump.

After that Saturday, our dispatch team added a new rule for 'start button' complaints. If the machine has a drain error code, callers get told over the phone how to check the filter before we even roll a truck. It saved us from maybe a dozen false alarms in the next year. (Should mention: we did the same for ice machines, and it worked even better.)

The real lesson: quality is how fast you show up

Here is the part I keep coming back to. That hotel had four washers, a Taylor freezer, and a gas range acting up - all before 9:30 in the morning. By 9:45, everything was running again. The laundry team caught up before checkout. The kitchen did not lose a single banquet slot.

Was the toothbrush gross? Yes. Was the fix complicated? No.

But the reason that hotel will call me again is not because I can remove a toothbrush from a pump. It is because we showed up on a Saturday, took the call seriously, worked in the right order, and solved four problems in one trip.

In the hospitality business, equipment is invisible until it breaks. When it breaks, that is when the guest experience - and the property's brand - gets tested. A guest does not care about the part number on a Maytag or the error code on a Taylor freezer. They care that their sheets are clean, their food is safe, and the building does not smell like a machine graveyard.

Quality is not a feature you add at the end. It is the whole chain: equipment choice, maintenance habits, response time, and the calm voice on the phone at 6:47 AM. I have watched properties try to save money with maintenance vendors who would have replaced the control board first, charged a $100 diagnostic fee, and still left the drain fault blinking. That is not a cheaper route. That is a more expensive one with extra steps.

So, if you are running a property with commercial laundry and kitchen equipment, here is my honest advice:

• Keep a small toolkit and learn how to check a drain pump filter on your washers.
• Put condenser coil cleaning on the calendar for your freezers - Taylor and otherwise.
• Understand that gas stoves still need electricity, so do not plan around cooking during an outage.
• When a machine shows a fault code, read the code, check the simple stuff, then call in the expert.

This approach worked for us because we cover commercial equipment in high-turnover facilities. If you are a homeowner with a single washer, the calculus might be different. But a sonic electric toothbrush finding its way into a pump? That is universal.