Maddenation

Fixing a dryer

This is another one of those quintessentially quotidianic experiences that I occasionally see fit to quote. About six weeks ago, the dryer stopped working and I decided to take a look at it. I soon determined that the drum was not turning because the belt connecting it to the motor was broken. I was able to find the part and order it from an Internet supplier. It arrived in about 10 days, but at least I avoided the extra charge for quick delivery. I installed it without much difficulty and we were back in business. For a while.

About two weeks ago it stopped working again, this time by not heating up. Because it is a gas dryer, I thought twice about the potential danger involved in fixing it myself. Actually, I thought about it multiple times. One of those times I was on the golf course, and my golfing buddy said he’d think twice about working on a gas dryer. What both of us were thinking about, of course, was inadvertently blowing up the house.

The options were clear: 1. buy a new dryer (~$500), 2. call for a repair man ($85 for the house call plus parts and labor for fixing it), or 3. fix it myself for whatever the part(s) cost. There was also the fourth possibility that I’d spend time and money trying to fix it and still have to hire a professional or buy a new one. I decided to attempt to fix it myself.

I looked on the RepairClinic website and found a diagram of the dryer setup. It looked like the most probable failed part was the “ignitor.” Also, I was sure I could replace this part without blowing up the house. After thinking about it for another day or so, I drove to the Denville parts store I’ve used for decades to buy appliance parts. It wasn’t there.

A few doors down from where the parts store used to be was a vacuum cleaner repair and music store. (I kid you not.) Behind the assortment of CDs was the repair shop. I thought that maybe the parts store had morphed into this new-age thing, so I went in and asked about dryer parts. The woman standing in the midst of several hundred upright vacuum cleaners (none of which were running, thankfully) said immediately, “Valley Appliance Parts, Rockaway.” Later, I found out that this was what had became of the Denville store when the owner died.

I looked up the store on my iPhone and mapped it out on my iMap and found it was 3.1 miles away. I found it easily and bought a replacement ignitor for 40 bucks, twice what my Internet supplier was charging (without shipping).

It took me a while to figure out how to get at the old part to replace it. You have to take the front panel off the dryer and then remove part of the burner assembly to get at the ignitor (glow bar). Then, because the drum rides on a circular pad surrounding the dryer door, you have to disengage the motor from the drum belt in order to test the system. (I realized later that you can test to see if the igniter is lighting by merely raising the dryer top and looking down the front left corner to observe the orange toaster-glow of the properly working igniter.) Disengaging the belt must be done from the back of the dryer, through a foot-square door at the bottom. This is awkward, but not life threatening.

I pushed the button to start the partially disconnected dryer and saw the igniter begin to glow almost immediately. Then I waited for the temperature sensor to kick in and tell the solenoids to open up and let in the gas. This didn’t happen. I mean, the gas didn’t come in. I didn’t know if this was because the temperature sensor didn’t sense, or because of some other problem. I decided to wait for a while and try it later.

As a technically trained individual, I know that “waiting for a while to try it again” is not an appropriate action to take when repairing an appliance unless the appliance is a computer. Nonetheless, this is what I did, because my bones were beginning to ache and I wanted to watch another episode of Charley Rose. I think this was the one where Charlie interviews a German director about his body of work, especially an old movie where he built a ship and towed it over some South American mountain as part of a story about some guy who actually did that for some real purpose once upon a time. I think the filming had to be interrupted because of some boarder war. I don’t remember the director’s name or the movie or the country he was filming in. I’m not sure it was the same country in which the original story took place.

In any event, when I returned to the basement to try the dryer, it worked. I don’t know why, but the flame lit, and everything looked good. So I put it back together, feeling happy that it would be ready before mom returned from work. However, when I tried the fully assembled dryer again, it didn’t heat up. This is when I realized that I could check the glow bar merely by raising the top, so I did that, and saw that the bar glowed for a while, but went out when the gas failed to start. Then I did it again, and the flame lit, but then went out after a while and didn’t come on again. In other words, it wasn’t fixed.

Now, I still have the same three choices I had before, except that the “fix it myself” option is starting to sound like throwing good money after bad. I remember that the Repair Clinic site said that, if the glow bar glows for a while and then goes out, replace the solenoids. However, it could be that the temperature sensor is not sending the signal to the solenoids, or maybe even some other problem I knew nothing about. Then I remember that the flame did light a couple of times, and I think that it’s more likely the solenoids work intermittently than the temperature sensor, which would probably go bad and stay bad. What the heck, I decide to replace the solenoids.

The solenoids cost another $40, twice as much as the Internet price. It is after 5 o’clock when I get home and have to disassemble the dryer again and figure out how to remove the solenoids. (Kind of like a doctor having to remove your adenoids, I guess.) Suffice to say it was not easy, but also not life threatening. It did involve disconnecting the gas line, but I turned off the valve before doing so. When I put everything back together, it worked.

So I saved the cost of a repair man, and even better, the cost of a new dryer. Overall, counting the belt, the igniter, and the solenoids, I spent about $100. Of course, at my normal billing rate, I spent about $1000 of my time, but I wasn’t doing anything else anyway. Technically, I probably didn’t need the igniter. I replaced it without confirming that the old igniter wasn’t working. Given the problem with the solenoids, I could most likely have left the old igniter in there. We lost the use of the dryer for a few days, but we were able to use the neighbor’s dryer (until the neighbor’s dryer died) or hang up the clothes on the line out back. By the way, the neighbor bought a new dryer. I didn’t bother telling her I could have fixed it.

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