For the last couple of weeks, our clothes dryer has not been doing a very good job of drying our clothes. It often takes four or five cycles to get things to a reasonably dry state.
If it weren't Winter and we didn't live in Michigan, putting the clothes out on a line might be an option. Given we just suffered an ice storm this past weekend and the temperatures are right around freezing, I needed to find a different solution.
Luckily, I am not unfamiliar with a little bit of appliance repair work. Likewise, I am not afraid to tackle new things and get my hands a little dirty. At our past house I needed to open our dryer and replace the drum slides, so I am fairly familiar with the inside components.
After moving the dryer away from the wall and disconnecting the power and exhaust duct, I was looking at the picture you see above. It was actually a lot dustier than what you see here, but I did a quick run of the vacuum to get rid of a majority of the dust.
Next, I removed the back of the upper control section as you see in the picture above. Between the back panel and the upper control panel the two plates were held on by about 15 screws. It was a quick process to remove them and set them to the side.
With both panels off, it was time to start doing some testing. Thankfully, I still had my old digital multi-meter handy and the batteries were still good in it. I followed this YouTube video I am going to embed below and started the process of testing the components.
The three heating units in the lower part of the unit all tested okay as far as continuity and ohms were concerned. I wasn't too surprised by that because I had noticed earlier that the knob at the top "felt funny". I wanted to be thorough, so I did the tests on the lower part of the unit anyway.
The next part of the testing required me to focus in on the piece that I had a feeling was bad in the first place. After walking through the process of testing it with my multi-meter, I found that indeed it appears to be bad.
I went ahead and removed the timer controller and started calling repair shops in the area to see if any of them had a replacement part. Unfortunately, it appears that because there are so many different brands of dryers, there are a multitude of different timer controllers.
It isn't cost effective for repair shops, home improvement warehouses, or hardware stores to keep an inventory of these parts because they may sit on the shelf forever never getting purchased. It appeared my only option was to order the item online and wait for it to be delivered to my house.
I wasn't surprised by that, but I was a little bummed. I had been hoping to take the part into one of the repair stores and have them check it as well to make sure that I wasn't incorrect in my assumption or testing of the unit. Since the replacement part costs North of $50 I wanted to get some verification that it was in fact kaput.
Since no one had them in stock, it didn't make sense to venture out and have them check my old one. Especially since my region of the state was staring down the barrel of a major ice storm. I simply hopped on Amazon and ordered the part that I needed. It is set to ship later this week and I have my fingers crossed that it will fix our issue.
Doing laundry has become a huge pain in the butt because of this malfunction. It would almost be quicker to take our clothes to the laudromat and do them there at this point. I will be sure to do a follow up post after the repairs are complete letting you know if that fixed it or not!
Here is the embedded YouTube video I used to assist with the repairs: