2 1/2 year old Whirlpool front loader rarely spins at full speed on spin cycle.

It will occasionally still get to full speed on a load of kids clothes which are all small items. In that case it goes through what seem like a lot of rebalance/spin slow/spin fast retries before it ultimately takes the spin all the way up to maximum. I assume because the items are small the load balances well.

When I do a load of adult clothes or towels, it goes through the same retries but is never able to take the spin all the way up to max. I 45 minute cycle (according to the front panel) actually takes 1:10 to complete. I have tried taking half the load out and running just a drain/spin cycle and it goes through that doing the same thing - many rebalanaces/spin slow/spin fast/repeat but never gets all the way up to speed. I tried 6 towels the other day, which is not that much stuff. I tried putting 3 towels from that finished load through a drain/spin. Then I tried 4 thinking it could not balance only 3 towels. In every case, it would not spin all the way up.

It was not always like this. In the past, when I noticed it not spinning all the way up because it was too full, I was able to split the finished load into two and run a drain/spin cycle and it would go all the way up. This was the case even for towels. Now the half loads I am trying aren't quite as large as those I ran through, let's say a year ago.

I've read through many forum posts here and have not found this exact behavior so I have no idea where to start. I am pretty handy but if this is going to be a ton of work, I may just bite the bullet and have a tech come out.

It's not the end of the world. The clothes are almost as dry as they used to get in our old style upright belt driven machine. I have a feeling this is costing me a lot of electricity because the dryer has to make up for it.

When you say "under the top" do you mean I have to figure out how to get the top cover off the machine?