---
title: "A Kenmore Washer Full of Water: How to Empty It and What to Check"
description: "Kenmore washer not draining: how to empty the drum safely, the checks in order, and why a 110 and a 796 are two different machines on the same complaint."
url: "https://kenmoremiami.support/blog/kenmore-washer-not-draining-whirlpool-or-lg/"
date_modified: "2026-09-01"
Category: "Common Problems"
---


# A Kenmore Washer Full of Water: How to Empty It and What to Check

## Kenmore washer not draining: getting the water out first

The diagnosis can wait ten minutes. What you have right now is a sealed drum with an inch or more of water in it and a load of laundry that is going to start smelling by tomorrow, so the first job is to empty the machine — and how you do that depends on which of two completely different washers you own.

Read the plate before you do anything. Under the lid on a top-loader, on the frame inside the door on a front-loader. Three digits, then a period.

## If it says 796: the little door at the bottom

An LG-built front-loader carries a small hatch low down on the front of the cabinet, and behind that hatch sit a drain pump filter and a short hose. That hose is there for exactly this situation. It is designed to be opened by hand, with no tool.

Put a baking tray and a folded towel under it, pull the hose out, take the cap off, and let it run. It will fill the tray several times over — cap it, empty the tray, carry on. When the flow stops, twist the filter itself out and see what has been living in it.

More than half the time the thing in the filter is the reason the machine stopped, and you have finished.

## If it says 110: no door, so a jug

A Whirlpool-built top-loader mostly has no external filter door and no drain hose you can open. Two options.

Bail the drum out with a jug into a bucket, which is slow and works. Or pull the machine forward, take the drain hose off the standpipe, and lower the end of it into a bucket standing on the floor — the drum empties by gravity, provided the bucket is below the water level in the tub. Have a second bucket.

## Then the checks, cheapest first

**The drain hose.** Kinked where the machine has been pushed back against the wall, or pushed so far down the standpipe that the machine siphons. Both are free, both are common, and both are invisible until you look behind the machine.

**The filter or coin trap.** Covered above on a 796. On a 110 it is internal, and it is our job rather than yours.

**Detergent.** A high-efficiency machine cannot pump foam. Give it ordinary detergent, or the correct detergent in the quantity somebody used in 1995, and it fills with suds, adds rinse after rinse trying to clear them, and eventually gives up with water in the drum. Both manufacturers publish a warning for this and both mean the same thing: use less.

**The house drain.** A standpipe that has backed up is not a problem with the washer. It announces itself by overflowing rather than by leaving the drum full.

**The pump.** Last, deliberately. It is the part everybody assumes and the part that turns out to be at issue least often. A pump that is receiving no signal is a control problem, not a pump problem, and telling those apart is a measurement rather than a guess.

## What each machine tells you while this is happening

This is where the two builders diverge again. An LG-built machine generally names the problem — a short code that its own documentation calls a water outlet error. A Whirlpool-built machine may show a long-drain message, or may simply stop mid-cycle and say nothing at all, particularly on an older control.

Neither behavior is worse than the other. But it does mean that "it just stopped and there was no code" is normal on one of these machines and unusual on the other, and knowing which you have is the difference between a useful phone call and a guessing game.

## When to stop and call

Stop if the water still will not move once the filter has been emptied and the hose runs straight. Stop if the machine trips the breaker. And stop if there is water on the floor rather than only in the drum — that is a different problem with a different urgency, and it does not wait for the weekend.

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