Dryer Troubleshooting - Not Drying or Taking a Long Time to Dry

Hi guys. Today I want to help you troubleshoot your dryer that is taking too long to dry your clothes. When a dryer is taking too long to dry your clothes, a lot of times people think that the dryer is going out or the heating element is wore out. But most of the time, this indicates some sort of airflow issue. Airflow issues can also cause the safety thermostat to trip or the thermal fuse to blow. And usually when one of these parts go out, it's related to one of the three things that I'm going to go over today. The first thing that I want to cover is your dryer's lint filter. It is very important that you clean your dryer's lint filter between each and every load of laundry that you do. You'd be surprised how many people don't do this. The lint filter is where the hot damp air in the dryer needs to pass through before it leaves the dryer. And if the lint filter is blocked up, the air can't get out and your clothes aren't going to dry. Or it'll take a really long time for your clothes to dry. The second thing that I want to cover is your dryer vent hoses. I would recommend having them cleaned at least once a year. Over time, the inside of the vent hoses will start to build up with lint, causing the air that passes through the hoses to slow down, causing very poor dry times. If the dryer venting is longer than 10 feet, I would recommend having them cleaned at least every six months or so, just because of the fact that the air has to push through such a long hose that it's going to slow down even more at the end before it gets out. So when the air moves slow, the lint gets trapped inside the vent a lot easier than if it was a short one. And another thing you need to check is going to be where the vent hose leaves the house. Usually you have some sort of damper or flap or some sort of louver, screen, or whatever you have on the outside of your house. You need to check that at least every month or so, because a lot of times I've seen squirrels build nests, chipmunks, dryer sheets, just flat out lint will build up on the outside of that and that'll cause the restriction at the end of the hose. And the last thing I want to cover is the dryer itself. This is just as important as the first two that I covered. If you want to keep your dryer running efficiently, if you've cleaned your lint filter between every load and you keep your vent hoses clean, the last thing you want to do is make sure you clean the inside of your dryer. And I'm not talking about where you put your clothes inside the dryer, but the parts that you can't see inside your dryer. The dryer isn't exactly airtight, so if you have some sort of venting issue, the lint's going to start to accumulate inside the bottom of your dryer and basically put a layer of lint over top of the components on the inside, including your heater, your motor, thermostats. It definitely could cause a fire. Lint will also build up on the rollers, the pulleys, causing the belt to have a lot of friction whenever it's going around and you'll be replacing your dryer belts a lot more frequently than you need to. So lately, my wife's been telling me that our dryer's been taking way too long to dry to close, so I'm going to take this opportunity to show you how to clean the inside of a Kenmore dryer and show you what... I have no idea what's inside my dryer right now. So when I start pulling this apart, you either may see a whole bunch of lint like I was talking about. It may be relatively clean. My dryer vent goes right through the wall. That's about it. So I don't have to really worry too much about venting issues, but I'm going to show you the flap outside, how it opens and closes while the dryer's running. I'll show you the inside of the pipe. And the main thing is we're going to take this apart and I'm going to show you what you need to clean inside here to make it run a lot more efficiently. When I get dryers in over at the shop, first thing I do before I even check them out is I'll take them apart and clean the lint out. I've seen lint this thick laying inside the bottom of the dryer just covering the motor. The motor's got burnt lint all over it. The top of the heater housing will have burnt lint. I don't know how they didn't catch on fire. A lot of times if I don't clean these and I plug them in and try to test them out because they were moved in maybe the back of a truck or during shipping or whatever, some of that lint will fall down inside the heater. And I've caught many dryers on fire just because of that reason right there. So we use that example of the dryer fire here. Say you get a dust of wind that comes through and your flap is partially open and the wind blows back through the back of the dryer. That could disrupt the lint inside your dryer and it could lay on top of your heater. The next time you turn your dryer on it may smell, it may smoke, or it just may catch on fire. So you definitely want to make sure that, you know, maybe once a year you clean the inside of your dryer. And it's very important. It will restrict. It will cause the dryer to run for two, three, four hours sometimes before the clothes are even dry. So when you get to that point you definitely know that there's some sort of issue going on. So I'm going to show you. So here we go. The first thing I'm going to do is pull out the lint filter. Now this is what the lint filter looks like after one load. And you can see that by the end of the load there's not a whole lot of air actually passing through the lint filter. So this definitely needs to be cleaned before each cycle. All right so we've come outside. I've turned the dryer on. Now what I want to do is check to make sure that the flap is completely opened. All right so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and take the dryer vent hose off the back of the dryer and we're going to check inside that hose right there to make sure it's not blocked up with lint. So I'm going to pause this for a minute and I'm going to go ahead take that off and I'm going to show you what we find inside. All right what I've done is I've disconnected it from the vent that goes out of the house. Now because of the way I got this hooked up I actually have to take the back panel off before I can unhook this because I actually have this slid in and taped on there so I can't just unhook it. And that was to stop it from popping off because it's only a little tiny piece that sticks out and sometimes it's a pain in the butt to try to keep the vent hose connected. So I went ahead and made it extra strong. So right now I'm going to remove the back panel. And yes I did unplug it from the wall before I do this. Hey buddy. Looks like I got the help from our little friend. There you go. Watch out. Want to go in? Want to go in? All right it's not it's not taped. It just clamped on way in the back. I'd say it's not so bad and that's because it's a real short hose so the air moves sort of fast through the beginning of it doesn't have really a chance to constrict that much. Plus it wasn't wasn't kinked or bent or you know so that that's not bad at all. I don't know if you can see that or not but that's what it should look like. And yes when I slid this out I had to sweep the floor because there was a ton of ---- on the floor here. Socks, hairpins, pennies, coins, hair. I think I even found some mouse poop in here. So yeah I swept this up and you guys didn't see it. Mine was pretty dirty. All right now what we're going to check is right down here. This little area right here. This is the lint filter housing. So what I've done is I went ahead and took the lint filter out. I took the two screws that hold the housing on. Now what I'm going to do is go ahead and take out the screws that hold the the bottom of this on and we're going to remove this whole thing here. We're going to check and see what's inside there. All right so I got the screws out so now what we're going to do is lift them pull this out and holy crap this is the area I'm talking about down here. Which this one actually isn't so bad. Looks like what do we got sunflower seeds? Probably in my son's pocket. Some hairpins and all kinds of stuff. Wow it's a little embarrassing. And then right there's your blower wheel. You see all the junk inside there. So now after we have checked this I'm going to go ahead and clean this out. I'm just going to wipe all that out of there so this vent here is completely free of any kind of debris. I'm going to go ahead and you know shop back all this stuff off. Then we're going to move to the inside of the dryer. All right so what I've done is I just pushed the dryer back now I've left the two screws out of the lint filter because I want to lift up the lid. I'm going to take the front panel off and we're going to look inside and see what's under and around my motor and stuff like that. Now I'm going to take the drum out but you don't have to take the drum out to shop back inside there but I'm going to do that so you can see inside. So I'm going to go ahead and just now there's two little clips under the front. You can either stick a putty knife in there pushing the tab to lift up. What I normally do is just pull the front panel forward and then they come off the clips. Now the dryer is still unplugged. All right now once you get the lid up facing towards the front there's going to be two more screws and a plug for your lid switch or your door switch. And yes they're always a pain in the butt. Oh you can't eat that. There you go. All right now this just two little hooks. Front panel sits down over top of the hook so you lift all the way and that's it. All right so here's the inside of my dryer. Get that out of the way and it's actually not so bad. I have seen dryers after a few years that were so thick of lint in the bottom here that you couldn't see the white paint anything on the motor just solid and the rollers they still spin pretty freely. I've seen these where you have to use your hand to actually turn them because so much lint gets built up around this shaft here down inside here covers the motor and if the motor is covered with lint it's going to overheat and definitely shorten the life of the motor. Same thing with your idler pulley this should spin pretty freely. If this here was stiff or hard to move then you would definitely be breaking belts all the time. So if you're breaking belts all the time check this out make sure it's clean. I usually blow them with an air gun and oil them up. All right that's it so there you have it. Now I'm going to go ahead and shop vac this out and put it back together and it's going to run a lot better when I'm done. Thanks for watching.