So my dryer has malfunctioned. I’m hanging my clothes out to dry. Of course there’s a lot to the story of how this happened. I posted a few pictures of my creative sun drying process on Facebook.   My umbrella on the deck doubled as a rack to suspend my laundry to be dried. Worked pretty well when temperatures were at all time high.

Seattle was experiencing “higher than normal”  summer temperatures. At  100° just about anything takes little time to dry.

My pillows, old-fashioned eiderdown, occasionally need laundering. I’m not one to run things that my face and head will rest on to the local dry cleaner. I prefer to run one pillow at a time through the washer and air dry to as much extent as possible and fluff in clothes dryer to finish off the process.

I’ve had these pillows for a while. Ahem.  OK they are practically family heirlooms…but I’d chaperoned these babies through the process many times. Once too often, apparently.

As I strolled through the house I  smelling something burning.  Our neighbors often cook a batch of ribs or brisket in their smoker. No signs of life in that direction, and no cooking meat smells grabbed my nose.

A walk back into my own kitchen, toward the laundry room yielded the acrid smell of burnt chicken.

I yanked open the dryer door. Greeted to a site I had a hard time processing, I stopped dead in my tracks.  My entire dryer was filled with feathers and down, some of which had apparently come in contact with the heating element.

I began the arduous process of capturing all those little tiny pieces of fluff in a queen size pillow to fill a 33 gallon heavy duty black plastic trash bag.

For a brief moment my mind traveled to a visual scenario; one that involved a special machine, in a factory… cramming goose down into a thick fabric pillowcase. Wow, how could they possibly get all of this fluff into that small pillow case?

Machines to the resque? Feathers and down clogged my small Dyson unit in no time. A search of the garage yielded a  Shop Vac, which seemed a better option.

At this point my hubby strolled through, sniffed, and asked “What’s that smell?”

“Burnt down pillow,” I gasped. “Fabric disintegrated in the dryer.”

By this point I’d wrangled most of the volume in a trash bag, tightly closed and placed into the garbage receptacle in the garage. He looked at the few remaining feathers floating around and assessed the situation as “this doesn’t seem too bad.”

I began to laugh.

Breathless, I mimed how full the dryer had been, and my struggle to capture what was behind the grate that might ignite against those heat coils.

The family’s nickname for my husband at home is Tool Man. He is always willing to tackle any task, the more complex the better. Soon he was perched on a stool, stretched into the bowels of the clothes dryer.

“Why do you want to get in to this section?”

He knows the answer-I’m a clean freak. A disassembled appliance presents an opportunity – to clean all those crooks and crannies I can’t normally reach when the unit is operational.

Certain that tufts of down lurked beyond the reach of my trusty Dyson; I vacuumed and blasted the area with my handy Data Vac electric duster. But the flash light revealed feathers that still clung to the heat element.

Certain that future loads of laundry would smell like burnt bird feathers, I insisted on gaining access.

“What about the possibility of future fire?”

He looked down from the stool, “Oh I think it will be fine.”

“Nope.”

My desire to make sure that I had cleaned out every last bit, wore him down. I insisted that he help me wrestle the back plate off.

When it didn’t come loose so that I had free access to the heating element, I said “what about these three screws?”

Fatal words that echo in my head were followed by a sickening clunk as he loosened the third screw.

The dryer drum locked, wouldn’t budge, and not even an inch. Oh great. I said “now we’re going to have to go and take off the back of the dryer to fix this problem.

Not how my husband had wanted to spend the rest of his afternoon, most assured.

Hubby sighed and went to get his tool box. I called after him…“Whatever you do don’t open that garbage bag in the dumpster.”

Our Frigidaire model doesn’t come apart from the back. YouTube videos were not particularly helpful. At this point my Tool Man actually suggested we call an appliance repair person.

It was a hot day and he was ready for a cold beer.

I dashed to the phone…

Sadly, the highly praised local one-man appliance repair operation in our little city, appeared to be on vacation. No answering service and his phone’s message box was full.

Undaunted I consulted the greater Seattle area internet listings for reliable appliance repair, found a sophisticated outfit that allowed me to book my appointment for repair online, and promised to show up as early as 8 AM the next morning. Perfect!  A text message of confirmation appeared on my smart phone.

 

Of course the “window of time between 8 AM and 11 AM evaporated.  I needed to leave for an appointment.  Sure enough the repair guy pulled into the drive as I backed away. Hubby was happy to host the fellow and escorted him to the laundry room. He wanted to watch, possibly offer some suggestions too, of course.

 

A second text arrived to my phone; hubby had sent the repairman packing.

 

Twelve years ago we spent $699 on this dryer, and it was going to cost almost $500, possibly more to be repaired.

 

I had to agree with his logic of nixing the repair, but it meant he’d doubled down and decided to fix it himself. The helpful young man pointed him to a couple of YouTube videos that showed exactly how to disassemble the dryer.

 

I took a deep breath, booked a lane in the pool at our club. I planned to stay out of the way as much as possible. Hubby took off a day from work to devote his full attention to the project. An hour later, the removal of the dryer’s drum upheld my theory.

While many loads of laundry dried out under the umbrella on our deck,  we finally were able to reassemble all the parts and pieces.

“What’s this?”

A large flat disk, clearly belonged in the back of the drum…there it was- behind the door.

The proverbial screw left over after one has reassembled the machine…Except this wasn’t a spare piece of hardware, this looks pretty important.

Hubby sighed.  He had so much practice at this point, hauling the drum in and out of the frame. “I can do it in my sleep.”

 

Finally all things assembled, including some makeshift machine screws that stuck out maybe just a tad longer than they should have, but we turned on the dryer and heat came out.

“Yay!”

 

But wait… what’s that noise? Horrible sounds; bangs, thumps and the rotation of the drum yielded screeching scratching noises.

 

Undaunted, hubby again hoisted out the dryer drum. He tried filing off the ends of those screws that obviously were sticking out too far, reassembled the whole unit and tried it again. Screechy sounds still filled the air.

 

“What are these tiny pieces of wire?”  I spied tiny bits of brittle wire that now littered the bottom of the dryer cavity.  I’d just vacuumed up all the dust and dirt and the extra down that was floating around in here, these little pieces of wire were not present when I did that task.

 

“Where did they come from?”

 

Hubby noticed a few a little gaps in the wires of the heating element, but dismissed my concerns saying the majority were intact. He sounded confident- “Should still heat up.”

 

Fortunately there was an ace hardware, just down the street. Not only did they sell the machine screws we needed, plus… they stock hubby’s favorite brand of cold beer.

 

Reassembled once again with the correct hardware in place, a flip of the switch yielded no more scraping noise, just the quiet rotation of our dryer.

 

Elated, I grabbed my latest load of laundry and tossed three fairly wet towels into the dryer. Fingers crossed, I flipped the switch. I heard a good sound- hum of the drum turning. I went outside to pick berries. Thirty minutes later I noticed the dryer had quit running.  I open the door and found my three still wet towels clumped together in the bottom. They were cold. No warmth at all came out to greet me at all when I restarted the unit.

 

Those little tiny pieces of wire apparently represented some major gaps in the heating element coils. No connections, ergo no heat. My handy husband created a shorter circuit, bypassing the broken section, and once again declared the dryer “fixed.”

 

A flip of the switch yielded no heat whatsoever coming out, so now we were back at the YouTube video looking at the part numbers for the heating element.

 

The novelty of hanging clothes out on the sun umbrella has lost its charm.

 

My back and shoulders hurt.

 

UPS is scheduled to deliver the heating element… sometime next week.

 

Stay tuned.

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