Trego's Mountain Ear

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” -Arthur C. Clarke

The inside of my dryer might as well have been magic, as I’d never seen the inside of it. However, when it stopped working a screwdriver proved sufficient to change that.

Rural as we are, the decision to take apart an appliance is an easy one. It was a cheap dryer (the portable one I had in college), which means it’s possibly too cheap to justify getting someone out to repair it. But, being an appliance, it’s still not cheap to replace.

As it turns out, dryers are actually really simple. They have relatively few moving parts and not all that many that can break.

You can sort of ‘webMD’ your dryer by looking up what’s going wrong and trying to figure out which broken part might explain it.

Shutting off because the machine thinks it’s overheating? Not likely to be the heating element. Could be a sensor. Is the machine actually getting too hot? If it is, check the vent and then work your way through the rest of the system.

In this instance, the problem was that the fan belt broke. Nice and obvious as soon as the machine was open. No blower, no air flow, and yes, of course the machine thought it was overheating. It was! It’ll be a repair that costs less than $20.

It turns out, dryers are not magic.