How Often an LG Washer Actually Needs Its Drum Cleaned in Florida

How often should I tub clean my LG washer

The machine has an opinion and it is a reasonable one. LG washers count cycles and display tcL when the count reaches its threshold — in practice roughly every thirty loads, which is about monthly for an average household.

In South Florida, treat that as a floor rather than a target.

Why this climate changes the number

A front-loading washing machine has two design features that make it excellent at washing and vulnerable to smelling.

It uses very little water compared to an old top loader, which is the point — but it also means detergent residue is more concentrated and less of it gets flushed away.

And it seals with a rubber boot gasket that has a fold in it. That fold sits at the bottom of the door opening, it holds a little water after every wash, and the air in there never moves.

In a dry climate that combination is survivable. In a house where the ambient humidity sits high nine months of the year, and the laundry room is often the least ventilated space in the building, the biofilm that grows in that fold is a matter of weeks rather than seasons. What follows is a machine that smells faintly of a pond, and then laundry that comes out of a clean machine smelling of it too.

What the cycle actually does, and what it cannot

The tub clean cycle runs hot and long — one to two hours — and flushes the drum, the sump and the pump housing with far more water than a normal wash.

The drum must be completely empty. No laundry at all, not even one towel. Anything absorbent in there soaks up the residue the cycle is trying to remove, and it runs hotter than a normal wash, which is hard on fabric.

Add a cleaner. A tub cleaner tablet, or bleach. LG publishes a dose for its small SideKick pedestal drum — a quarter cup of bleach diluted in a quart of water — which is worth scaling sensibly rather than simply pouring more into a full-size machine.

What it cannot reach is the gasket fold. The cycle flushes the drum; the fold is outside it. That part is done by hand, with a cloth, by rolling the rubber lip back and wiping the underside of it. That is where the smell actually lives, and it is why people run three tub cleans and conclude the cycle does not work.

The habit that matters more than the cycle

Leave the door ajar between washes, and pull the detergent drawer out an inch.

Biofilm needs moisture. A drum and a gasket that dry out between loads do not grow one, and no amount of cleaning cycles substitutes for that. If you do one thing from this page, do this one.

In a household with small children, a washer door left open is a hazard worth weighing against the benefit — but where it is safe, it is the single most useful habit for a front loader in this city.

While you are there

Two other things live in the same maintenance visit and neither takes long.

The drain pump filter, behind a small hatch at the bottom front. Two or three times a year in an ordinary household. What comes out of it is often the reason a machine has started draining slowly.

The detergent drawer. It lifts out on most models. The residue that builds up in the back of the housing is the second most common source of a laundry smell after the gasket.

And a word about detergent

Most people use about twice what they should. A high-efficiency machine uses a fraction of the water an old one did and needs a fraction of the soap — and excess detergent does not rinse away, it accumulates, which is what feeds the problem this whole page is about.

If the machine has started showing Sud and adding rinse time to its cycles, that is not a failure. It is the washer telling you the same thing.