When we bought this house from my in-laws we inherited their washer and dryer. They were low-capacity and, in the case of the dryer, 20 years old, so when Husband renovated the laundry room we got a new set.
I can’t really complain about the washing machine (except that it’s way slower than any American machine would ever dare to be), but from the beginning I had the most trouble with the dryer. It was astoundingly reluctant to dry things—its only task. It seemed like it thought its job was to make everything smell moldy instead, and it was great at that. But the energy-efficiency of the appliance was compromised by the fact that it would take seven hours of drying effort to dry one load.
Husband, who does not do the laundry, kept telling me that I couldn’t expect an European-style energy-efficient dryer to be as awesome as what I was used to in the US, but it still seemed wrong that the dryer couldn’t even dry one sole item during a single cycle. I started to suspect that either there was a conspiracy in Europe to get people to just hang up all their laundry instead of using a dryer by making dryers total crap, or there was something actually wrong with the damn thing.
Finally I convinced Husband to get somebody out to look at it. First the man told me the problem was due to the full lint traps. “But I empty both of them every time!” He showed me three additional lint traps sprinkled throughout the machine. (Guess I should have read the manual.)
But when I told him it had worked poorly from the beginning, before there could have been any substantial build-up of lint (by the way, what color is your dryer lint? For a color load mine is always purple-grey.), he looked some more. He told me something technical I did not understand in Swedish, and said he’d come back next week with a new something-or-other.
He came back. He replaced the something-or-other, but that didn’t solve the problem. He came back the next week with some other mystery replacement part, and finally, lo and behold, the laundry is dry in just one cycle! Not hot and bone-dry, but not, you know, still actually wet. It seems like a miracle!
4 January 2012 at 2:46 pm
I’m glad your dryer works now, but it looks like there’s something wrong with your laundry room. Where are the piles of dirty clothes? And the heaps of clean clothes waiting to be folded?
4 January 2012 at 2:53 pm
Oh, I don’t hang out in the laundry room. I do all the sorting and the folding (note: I fold very few items) upstairs. I have four laundry baskets that I ferry about all the time, sometimes with the baby in them nestled amongst the dirty clothes. I used to keep an old stroller in the laundry room for the baby to sit in while I hung laundry up or whatever, but the mice kept shitting in it.
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4 January 2012 at 3:54 pm
Well, the washer and dryer look pretty, anyway. Why would you have multiple lint filters? That’s just odd. Our dryer lint is also in the blue/gray/purple range.
My mom had some clothesline strung in our basement to hang clothes during winter. When my sister lived in Italy, she had drying racks everywhere. I think my husband would like Europe – he’s always taking my stuff out of the dryer to hang it up somewhere. I complain that I want my clothing dried or else it chafes. He tells me that I will be very unhappy when society collapses and there is no electricity for drying clothes. I tell him that I will deal with it when it happens; until then, my clothes will be dried in the dryer!
4 January 2012 at 5:11 pm
When we lived in KY I had a crappy dryer that took 38 hours to dry a load. It was beyond annoying. We finally got a new washer and dryer right before we moved to NJ. I fear that we might need to replace our washing machine soon. It broke last winter and we had it repaired. And now it just doesn’t seem to be spinning all the water out of the clothes. Everything is always VERY wet when I put it in the dryer (which makes the dryer run for like 3 hours).
Well, I am glad your dryer is working. Nobody likes moldy clothes.
4 January 2012 at 7:04 pm
I’m glad it is fixed! I wasn’t expecting a happy outcome. I remember the first time we stayed with my FIL. He didn’t think to wash the sheets and they were so musty that we couldn’t stop sneezing. Mike threw them in the wash and it was a nightmare. I swear it took 7 hours to wash and dry those bad boys.
4 January 2012 at 7:44 pm
That was a happier ending than I expected too! I’m glad it worked out.
My lint is purply-gray also. I think that’s normal, and if it’s not, well, you’re in good company with your weird lint!
In Korea, we had a combination washer/drier (I mean all one machine, not a stackable item). It was appalling. It took about 5 hours to wash a tiny load, and they came out dripping, or 7 hours and they came out just regular wet.
6 January 2012 at 1:25 am
My lint is purple-gray unless I’m drying a red sweater or a brightly colored towel or blanket. Glad your dryer dries now! When our washer was first installed, our contractor forgot to remove a bolt so that when it was on the spin cycle, the whole thing vibrated so much it fell off the platform it was on. C had to sit there wrestling with it and holding it in place until the cycle finished. We were really happy to get that one fixed.