Dryer gone bad...

I have this habit of doing laundry constantly and daily. I will go through a room and grab all the dirty clothes up and run a load. My husband always teases me that he cannot lay down a pair of jeans at the end of the bed to wear later because I grab it up and throw it in the washer.

Well, we have a Whirlpool Duet set and I love them dearly but the dryer just hasn't been doing it's job over the last year. It has been telling me the clothes are dry and they are actually damp so I have to run it on a manual drying session to complete the drying. Of course this uses extra electricity and I constantly had loads washed and piling up because everything was out of sync. We had the service tech come out over 8 months ago and he said that it was the sensor and we should keep it cleaned off.

So, cleaning the sensor seemed to help but did not "fix" the problem. So, I am working on laundry and all the sudden one day a couple weeks ago the load is WET when the sensor tells me that it is dry - the clothes are not even warm! Grrrr!

I go online and look through people's blogs and I found a really good one that tells us what to check and the possibilities. This guy had pictures and step by step info for fixing the dryer; he even had the listing of where we could buy the parts because he had already done the homework when his dryer failed.

After Warren laid on the floor and tore the dryer apart we finally found this pictured part was bad...the heating element. The bottom of the dryer was FULL of lint and it looked like the lint had sat on this part and finally caused it to overheat. You would think the service tech would have actually inspected this part of the dryer when he was here!!!?

I ordered the part and we cleaned all the lint out from inside the dryer frame. We also plugged some of the holes where we felt the lint was coming in around the lint catcher.

The part came out of CA and it was delivered within 2 days. Warren slipped the part in, hooked everything up and away we went. The dryer works like it did when it was brand new :-) I had to catch up on twice the laundry but we saved some serious cash by doing our own repair. We figured it would have cost $300-350 total for a repairman to make two trips; one to figure out what was wrong and one to install a new part and the cost of the part. We paid $68 for the part and shipping!

Of course I still grab his clothes of the end of the bed and wash them every chance I get...you would think he would be used to it after about 15 years of being abused by me.