I fixed our dryer!
When Eric and Chantelle were here they used our Kenmore Elite HE4 dryer, which is the white version of what they have at home in blue. They pointed out, as we already knew, that ours was more of a clothes-spinner and less of a clothes-dryer. Both the washer and dryer are high-capacity units, but the dryer has seemed incapable of drying at one time the same amount of stuff that the washer can wash in one load, which is a lot of stuff.
My brother reported that after drying a load of towels or something in theirs and opening up the door to grab the toasty textiles, the clothes were actually almost painful to touch. Hmm… Not even close with ours.
I found and checked out the user guide in preparing to call Sears, and discovered the part about how the waranty would be void if a repair person came out and found that the Sears installers had hooked it up to the existing foil vent tube instead of the rigid metal vent tube they brought with them but didn’t use. Great.
In poking around behind the dryer with a flashlight to see how easy it would be to replace the foil tube with a solid one, I discovered that the dryer was shoved back so far that the vent tubing was crushed against a big drain pipe. I pulled the dryer out from the wall.
I just pulled a full load of clothes, towels, and jeans from the dryer, and they are all toasty warm and desert dry. Time to wash some quilts!
April 25th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Congratulations! It always pays to raise the hood for a look before calling in a mechanic (smile). Enjoy your toasty blankets, Lou
April 25th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
I thought the tube was full of lint. Didn’t even consider that it might just be squished against the wall!
April 25th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
I forgot to mention that I also went outside and discovered that they had painted over the louvres in the vent cover. I popped those open and cleaned out a little bit of lint buildup there, but the tube itself looked good. Except for the crushing, that is.