Saturday, June 06, 2009

Things are a little damp...

All of us have moved before and we all know how difficult it can be. Through all the moving, though, one thing stands out as the most difficult thing you face. It's not the good-bye's to good friends and neighbors; it's not the $$ required to move; it's not the uncertainty of a new town, ward, or home; rather, it's hooking up your stupid dryer vent. Right??

Now that Jason and Michelle have had some dryer problems, they jinxed me and my dryer is acting a little funny. Yes, it is a Kenmore. But I can't necessarily blame the brand. We had a 20-yr.-old Kenmore dryer that we actually gave to Mom and Dad when theirs went out. That was about 6 years ago, so that dryer is nearly working on 30 years.

My dryer still acts like it's working fine. It turns on fine, the basin turns fine, I feel heat in the basin when I open the door, and the light bulb inside the basin works (oh, so important, I know). But it takes hours to dry a load. Lately we've been having to run it through a few cycles to get it to dry. That's like 3 hours or something! You all know me: I love wasting energy.

Today, after a LONG day of inside and outside work at Dad's house -- more on that later -- and my own, I decided to pull the dryer out, take it apart, and figure out what's going on.

Well, I took it apart. I'm now no closer to knowing what's going on. Everything looks fine in the guts of the dryer. I saw no obvious malfunctioning parts, and it wasn't actually that dirty. I vacuumed out any lint I could see, vacuumed out the dryer hose that goes outside, and put the thing back together. Now, back to my opening paragraph. I HATE INSTALLING DRYER VENTS AND HOSES! I spent more time trying to get that hose securely hooked up to the dryer than I did actually inspecting the innards of the dryer itself. Gads. What a waste of time.

One other thing about this Kenmore: we're not collecting a lot of lint. After a load of colors, you'd expect your lint guard to come out covered with a layer of colored softness, but alas, we are getting very little. Weird. I probably have a bad fuse or something (ha ha, in my dryer, not my head all you naysayers).

Now, back to Dad's house work: Lance and I went to Elk Ridge this morning to remove some asbestos and sheetrock. With Dad's new A/C install, they have some vent adjustments to make and he also wanted to insulate some water pipes that run alongside the duct work. Lance and I were purely physical labor and got that carcinogen off the ceiling and into our lungs -- er, rather, the carpet -- in just a few hours. We did a section of ceiling that ran from the fireplace (downstairs) to Kaitlin's bedroom -- basically the entire hallway down there. Wohoo! I know you were all wishing we would have waited until the week of Gilly's wedding so you all could have helped. We'll reconsider next time.

3 comments:

Michelle said...

Sorry to hear you are having dryer problems. HOpe you get them fixed quickly. I'm no help as to what's wrong, we always call the warranty guy since we are lucky enough to still have one, although that expires next summer and I can just see our dryer breaking for the 4th time next year the day after the warranty, isn't that how it always goes?

Mike and Adrianne said...

Our drying wasn't working for us for awhile in Oklahoma and it is starting to have the same problems. We were having to dry things a few times before they got dry and weren't getting a lot of lint. Mike climbed on the roof and unclogged the vent. As good as new. We will probably have to do that here as well. It sounds like what you are discribing is what we were dealing with.

Jess and Jen said...

I guess we must have a clogged vent, too. We did have birds nesting in our vent last month, but I thought I cleaned that out. Obviously, I didn't do a very good job.

I've never had a warranty on a dryer. We decided against it when we purchased the one we have now (about 5 years ago). In fact, besides my house, I don't think I've had a warranty on anything.