@pejacoby not sure how old, but it's not THAT hard to repair. You need about 40$ of spare parts and a couple hours with a screwdriver, wrench, and shop vac, and you can really repair most of the parts that wear out
It's fun, I looked up the possible issues this dryer has: there's five wheels that can break, one belt, and four sensors.
I haven't gotten to the sensors yet but all five wheels are bad and the belt is gone
@foone this oddly reminds me of recently fixing our litter robot. Nearly every single possible part that could fail that had electricity running to it had failed
@foone that looks a lot like the 25-year-old kenmore I have (torn down twice - the first one was an actually burned-through heating element (in that square-tube on the right), the second was three of the wheels no longer turned - hair burned in to a carbon layer on the bearing shafts.) For both of them, getting it to the stage you're at was the hard part; the parts are turned out to be pretty easy to get (the most recent repair was this year.)
I promised my roommates I wouldn't run Doom on it, but here's an idea:
The dryer has a moisture sensor, right? So it can tell how long it takes to dry a given set of clothes...
my spouse and I usually sleep while listening to letsplays, but somehow the playlist got messed up this morning and I got woken up early by it playing a video on how to repair dryers.
I was tossing and turning and they were like CAREFULLY REMOVE THE BELT FROM THE TENSONING WHEEL and I was like THIS IS THE WORST NIGHTMARE, I AM FIXING DRYERS IN MY DREAMS!
it's still not fixed: it turns out I had to replace the dryer felt seal too, as it had partially come off.
That took a day to get here, and then the glue takes 24 hours to cure.
but maybe tonight, I'll finally finish the job?
This dryer has the following items that are the main failure points that will need to be replaced if any of them break:
4 barrel wheels
1 tensioning wheel
1 belt
4 sensors
2 felt drum belts.
Of those, how many were broken?
Well, it's easier to list which weren't:
1 felt drum belt
0-4 sensors (replaced anyway as they be bad)
So if one more felt belt had died, this dryer would have had basically every major breakable part replaced. This isn't even the same dryer anymore, really.
@kboyd good question! If I hacked in it more, maybe. But if I make this repair project take any longer just for Foone reasons, I risk my roommates murdering me
@foone Impressive wear for 8 years tbh. Just refurbed a 2011 and 2015 heat pump drier because they were super cheap secondhand (and <2kWh is amazing for one washing machine worth of clothes). And all the rollers were still in usable shape surprisingly.
@foone I mean, not necessarily. A square wheel will roll smoothly on a road made up of catenary curve segments. Morphocular has a video on how to calculate a "perfect" road for any mathematically describable wheel
(note that just because their method yields a road shape for some wheel doesn't mean said wheel will roll smoothly, as some wheel shapes may have to clip into their respective road somewhere other than the contact point in order to roll smoothly)
@foone 8 years old?!! Is it in an industrial laundry facility in continuous 24/7 use? Are your clothes made exclusively of tungsten ring mail? What HAPPENED to this thing?
@glyph well it's 8 years old and we've been in this house for 3 years. So apparently the first 5 years were filled with the previous renters fucking it up
@foone That or count the number of heater cycles at the end of the drying cycle, and open the door to enter the desired letter.
If you graph the power consumption of a dryer you'll find this really weird PWM function; it starts out 100% duty cycle and starts to iterate downwards until it's done
@foone
Seriously, the 'moisture' sensor in these is basically a poorly made capacitor with a temperature coefficient that is as predictable as Powerball.
You should put the whole thing on a couple of strain gauges and use the loss of water mass to end the cycle.
@foone Those fucking cheapass wheels are such a failure point. I replaced them all 18 months ago and noticed yesterday that one is starting to squeak again.
Best of luck with the repairs and installing/not installing Doom