---
title: "A Washer Stopped Full of Water: The Filter Nobody Opens"
description: "How do I get my LG washer to drain only: the spin-only cycle, the drain tube beside the pump filter, and how to open it without five liters on the"
url: "https://lgmiami.support/blog/washer-stopped-full-of-water/"
date_modified: "2026-09-05"
Category: "Common Problems"
---


# A Washer Stopped Full of Water: The Filter Nobody Opens

## How do I get my LG washer to drain only

If the machine will still take a command, this is easy. Select a spin-only cycle — on most LG washers, press the Spin Speed key until a spin-only option is showing, then press Start. The pump runs, the drum empties, and you get your laundry back.

If it will not, or if it hums and nothing moves, the water has to come out by hand. That is what the rest of this page is about, and the part worth reading first is how not to put it all on your floor.

## The filter almost nobody has opened

Every front-loading washer has a drain pump filter behind a small hatch at the bottom of the front panel, usually on the right. It levers open with a coin. Its entire purpose is to catch the things that would otherwise destroy the pump — coins, hair grips, tissue, the corner of a receipt, the occasional key — and it is meant to be opened by the owner, regularly.

In practice, most machines we open have never had it out. What comes out of one is very often the whole explanation for a washer that stopped mid-cycle full of water.

## Why the order matters

The filter sits below the level of the drum. Everything in the machine is behind it. Unscrew it on a full drum and you get several liters across the laundry floor in about four seconds, which is memorable rather than useful.

LG fits a short drain tube beside the filter on many models for exactly this reason. Pull it out, take the cap off, and let it run into a shallow baking tray a liter at a time — cap it, empty the tray, repeat. It turns a flood into a slow trickle into a bowl, and it takes about five minutes.

Only when nothing more comes out is the filter itself unscrewed. Rinse it under the tap with a brush, feel carefully in the housing behind it — carefully, because a shard of glass gets in there as easily as a coin — and check the impeller turns freely with a finger.

**Refit it finger tight, not forced.** A cross-threaded filter is a new leak on top of an old one, and it is the commonest avoidable call we take after somebody has cleaned one themselves.

## Then the two things behind the machine

With the filter clean, run a spin-only cycle and listen.

**A pump that hums and moves nothing** is still blocked, or blocked further along. Check the drain hose behind the machine for a kink or a crush where it was pushed back into place, and check it is not pushed more than a few inches down the standpipe — a hose too far in can siphon and re-fill the drum as fast as the pump empties it.

**A pump that is silent** where there should be a hum has failed, or is not being told to run. That is a visit rather than an afternoon, and it is genuinely less common than either of the two causes above it.

## What the code says

LG publishes this as **OE**, and on the newer panels also as **E03** and **E21**. They are one condition with three spellings, which is worth knowing if you searched for one of them and found nothing — every page on this site that carries a code carries all the spellings the maker uses for it.

The maker's own troubleshooting order is the one above, and it is the right one because it goes from free to expensive: hose, filter, pump.

## One thing that is not this

If the machine drains perfectly and then will not spin, that is a different page. A drum full of water will never spin — the machine will not risk it — so a spin problem with water still in the drum is a drain problem wearing a spin problem's clothes. Get the water out first, then see whether the spin behaves.

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