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thisnewdayThe week before we moved into this house, about 25 years ago, I installed a brand new washer and dryer in the basement. Over the years, they've received minimal maintenance - a drive coupling on the washer, pulleys, thermocoupling, and drive belt on the dryer, etc.
What didn't get fixed - notice that I state this as if some unnamed third party, some disembodied entity, was somehow responsible for doing so - was a small tear in the wire mesh of the lint filter. And so, every time I emptied the filter over the next ten or so years, I'd say to myself, "I really oughta replace that filter."
Recently, the dryer has been failing to shut off at the end of the drying cycle. Also, the heat has been shutting off long before the clothes have dried. Turns out, it's probably a lucky thing.
My hypothesis, before attempting the repair, was that all the lint that had blown by the torn filter over the years was impeding the air flow through the vent pipe and giving a false reading to the various air flow and temperature sensors in the internal ducting and causing the burner to shut down prematurely.
So today, in my usual bass-ackwards fashion, I went to a parts supplier and bought a new filter and lint brush. In other words, I invested $35 in a hypothetical fix on an appliance which might, on further examination, be deemed unrepairable.
When I got home, I commented that now I HAD to fix the damn thing because I had the thirty-five bucks invested in it.
Then, I took the machine apart and discovered that my theory about the lint impeding airflow was only about half right. There was, in fact, a substantial build-up in the internal ductwork and a couple of the sensors were coated with some sort of foreign matter that might have insulated them enough to produce a false reading.
However, the bottom of the machine had enough of the untrapped lint in it to easily serve as a source of ignition for a truly nasty house fire.
As I commented to my daughter when I came upstairs to rest a bit, even if I didn't put the machine back together, even if it never turned another revolution, that thirty-five dollars was well spent considering everything, up to and including life, which might otherwise have been lost in a self-inflicted disaster...
What didn't get fixed - notice that I state this as if some unnamed third party, some disembodied entity, was somehow responsible for doing so - was a small tear in the wire mesh of the lint filter. And so, every time I emptied the filter over the next ten or so years, I'd say to myself, "I really oughta replace that filter."
Recently, the dryer has been failing to shut off at the end of the drying cycle. Also, the heat has been shutting off long before the clothes have dried. Turns out, it's probably a lucky thing.
My hypothesis, before attempting the repair, was that all the lint that had blown by the torn filter over the years was impeding the air flow through the vent pipe and giving a false reading to the various air flow and temperature sensors in the internal ducting and causing the burner to shut down prematurely.
So today, in my usual bass-ackwards fashion, I went to a parts supplier and bought a new filter and lint brush. In other words, I invested $35 in a hypothetical fix on an appliance which might, on further examination, be deemed unrepairable.
When I got home, I commented that now I HAD to fix the damn thing because I had the thirty-five bucks invested in it.
Then, I took the machine apart and discovered that my theory about the lint impeding airflow was only about half right. There was, in fact, a substantial build-up in the internal ductwork and a couple of the sensors were coated with some sort of foreign matter that might have insulated them enough to produce a false reading.
However, the bottom of the machine had enough of the untrapped lint in it to easily serve as a source of ignition for a truly nasty house fire.
As I commented to my daughter when I came upstairs to rest a bit, even if I didn't put the machine back together, even if it never turned another revolution, that thirty-five dollars was well spent considering everything, up to and including life, which might otherwise have been lost in a self-inflicted disaster...
