Bill Roper's Journal

With a bit of help from K, I have cleared the path in the basement between the bottom of the stairs and the laundry room, which *should* allow the delivery guys plenty of access to get the old dryer out and the new dryer in. They're not showing up until Wednesday (some time), but I wanted to get this done today, as I have plans for Tuesday, about which I'll say more tomorrow.

A few items have been brought up to be thrown away. The others were shifted to locations where they are out of the way, but will still need to be dealt with at a later date. Just not in the next two days...

And I have reunited Gretchen with her doumbek -- which she will now need to find a place to put away. :)

The dryer ran for a few loads and then gave up again. The current problem is almost certainly the thermal cutoff fuse, which is not an expensive part, but you have to disassemble the entire dryer to get at it which means this is going to be an expensive repair. If I had an appliance guy that I trusted around here, I'd consider giving up and paying to get it fixed, but I don't.

So tomorrow morning, I am going to pay about twice what it would cost me to get the current dryer fixed and start over with a new one. And I am going to keep the dryer vent clean, including finding someone to run the vent in a better way than the builder did.

In other news, the Cardinals have lost catcher Willson Contreras to injury again, as he was hit by a pitch while batting that broke the middle finger on his throwing hand. It's definitely being one of those years.

In better news, I got another song mixed down today while waiting for the load of towels to not dry.

"Things That Are Dry" sounds like a clue from the $100,000 Pyramid, but it is a category here in the Roper household today. In this case, it includes Gretchen's clothes that had been in the washer.

There was one more thing to try with the dryer before giving up and calling a repair tech. The problem is that it was something that was really inconvenient for someone who doesn't like getting down on the floor and who has large hands and arms. It was, however, a *great* task for someone who doesn't like getting down on the floor and has small (but longish) hands and arms.

Yes, this was a job for K, who really doesn't like getting down on the floor -- apparently, I timed today's festivities for *after* she had showered -- but who was able to reach through the hole in the back of the dryer where I had removed the internal vent pipe and press the reset switch on the thermal cutoff fuse. Given the amount of lint that is no longer in the pipes, this cure had some reasonable chance of succeeding. (Mind you, I ended up cleaning *more* lint out of that internal vent pipe that had been left behind by the tech who had cleaned out the dryer last week. But I digress...)

Anyway, the switch was reset, the dryer reassembled and put back in position, and the wet load of clothes was removed from the washer to the dryer. Nigh miraculously, the clothes were warm and dry an hour later.

There is some danger that the thermal cutoff fuse will continue to misbehave. This is, however, a ten dollar part. It even looks like you can install this through the two holes in the back of the dryer if your arms are long and thin enough.

I can think of someone in the household who would qualify as a dryer service tech for this.

I am fairly convinced that they will not be happy about this if they are needed to do it.

But bribery! I am not above bribery! :)

(And I still have to do something about getting the dryer vent rerouted to avoid this entertainment in the future. But moving the dryer out of the "urgent" category is a plus...)

My war against the dryer and its vent continues. And I have now come to understand where the original sin lies. Unsurprisingly, that's with the folks that built our house 25 years ago.

But let's start this story yesterday. The fellows we had engaged to clean our dryer vent showed up yesterday and removed a noticeable amount of lint from the vent. I explained to them the unusual configuration of the vent, but they just rammed the cleaning rod down the pipe from the outside, cleaned up the lint, and then left.

Today, I fired up a load of laundry, moved it from the washer to the dryer, and not too much later, the dryer was flashing the dreaded d90 signal, indicating that the vent was clogged. That was a pretty sad thing for a vent that was cleaned yesterday.

Late this afternoon, I set out to commit mayhem. See, the problem is that the dryer vent has a straight run of about 9 to 10 feet from the outside wall, then it makes a right angle turn, travels about five feet over, and then drops about eight feet to the bottom of the basement where it connects with the dryer. You may observe that this is not really a sane setup. And that is the fault of our builder.

The original plans for this house called for a first floor laundry. In order to accommodate Gretchen's mom, we had the laundry moved to the basement, the half bath converted to a full bath, and a closet added to the den to convert it into a bedroom. So far, so good. Everything got moved.

Well, everything got moved *except* for the dryer vent, which still exited the house where it would have gone if the laundry had remained on the first floor. Thus, the crazy five foot jog from where the dryer had been in the original plans to where it had ended up. A more competent builder would have moved the vent.

Having paid someone earlier in the year to clean the dryer vent, having paid someone earlier in the week to clean out the dryer, and having paid someone yesterday to clean the dryer vent *again*, it was now time to give up and do it myself. I started by disconnecting the flexible vent from the dryer which the guy who cleaned out the dryer had supposedly cleaned out, leaving a big pile of lint on the floor, because I guess he doesn't clean up after himself. It had a goodly amount of lint in it. It was short, so I could clean that out with the pipe cleaner lint brush.

But when I stuck the pipe cleaner brush up the vertical pipe, a bunch of lint came out. And there were limits to how far the pipe cleaner brush would go, because it only had so much handle. That limit was a lot shorter than the vertical pipe.

Also, I had untaped the flexible adapter from the vertical pipe. It was taped on with aluminized duct tape of which I had none, so I was going to need to obtain some more. I established that it was available at Home Depot and headed off in that direction with Gretchen riding shotgun.

At Home Depot, I found the aluminized duct tape. I also found a very long duct cleaning brush of the right diameter and decided that a bird in the hand right now was better than waiting for the already-ordered bird to arrive from Amazon tomorrow. It was too late to cancel the Amazon bird, but I will probably find a use for it in the future.

Back at home, I tried ramming the duct cleaning brush up the vertical pipe and finally concluded that I just needed to remove it. Had this been done by a better builder, I would have had to unscrew a mounting bracket, but our fine builder had attached the pipe to the studs with duct tape, so I just unwound the 25-year-old duct tape (25 year old things are better when they are Scotch) and unmounted the vent pipe.

With both ends available, the brush made short work of the lint. There was a lot of lint flying around by this point, but I had brought the shop vac over and was able to police the worst of it.

The problem was that the horizontal five foot run of pipe had been held up by the vertical eight foot run of pipe that I was now holding and it was sagging alarmingly. It was also, most likely, full of lint.

I pulled off the corner adapter which was (chorus) full of lint and cleaned it out. I desperately didn't want to remove the horizontal five feet of pipe, because it connected to the vent to the outside behind a ginormous pile that I didn't want to move. But I could reach it with the brush and I brushed it out well, possibly even well enough.

I realized that I was going to need another pair of hands to put this mess back together, so I summoned K who wanted to know why I hadn't summoned her sister who was already in the basement. I suggested that it was because K was better at following instructions. K was skeptical.

Anyway, after a good bit of swearing, everything was reconnected, although there are still a few junction points that will benefit from being taped at some point. I fired up the dryer and everything appeared to be working correctly.

The dryer terminated the cycle normally. When I went to check, the clothes were still a bit damp, so I sent them for another cycle, because this had been a large load of heavy fabric and the sensor dry occasionally gives up too early on these.

On the other hand, a bit damp beats the heck out of not dry at all.

This was more fun than I should have on a Sunday.

And very little mixing got done.

But perhaps we now have a working dryer again.

Ok, I was wrong.

There was still a substantial amount of lint in the dryer, but it appears that the dryer exhaust is clogged with something. This isn't a great surprise, I suppose, since there's no vent cap, but we were supposed to get a vent cap put on when the exhaust line was last cleaned and it didn't happen and here we are again.

The service tech doesn't clean lines, so we had to pay for the cleaning of the dryer inside and now we will have to pay to get the exhaust line cleaned again by someone else. We did avoid buying an expensive extended warranty plan from him. (I have been rather sour on these since the month of cold showers that I took while waiting for anything useful to happen with the Lowe's extended warranty on our water heater.)

The problem here is that when they originally built the house, they installed one of the vent caps that has a big piece of pipe coming out of it and mortared it into the wall. When the vent cap (too many years ago) gave up the ghost, there was no way to trivially replace it.

Today, I took a chair, a hammer, and a chisel out in the annoying afternoon heat and knocked out enough of the mortar to get a vent cap (with no attached pipe) to stay in position. When it is cooler, I will go to Home Depot, get a smaller chisel than the one that I had, and knock out enough additional mortar that the cap will sit flush.

I am annoyed for a large variety of reasons, one of which is that I know better than this, but it is difficult when you're fighting uphill against a badly engineered and hard to fix bit of kit.

*sigh*