(not really)
So I’m at work today and my wife calls and says that when she opened the drier (gas in this case) there was some smoke and a burnt smell.
I tell her to leave it off and I’ll check it out when I get home. I figured that I had put off cleaning the vent just a little too long, and I would have to fish some serious lint bunnies out of the vent.
So I get home and she suggests I sniff the inside of the drier. Whoa, super strong burnt smell. So I decide to start by looking inside the drier. Our washer drier is a stacked set from Maytag from about 1994. I’ve never touched the drier for anything before this.
So I pop the screws and drop the front panel. The entire inside of the unit is covered in lint. every surface has between 1/8" and a 1/2" or more of lint. Huge lint balls in the corners. A large percentage of this lint looks like it got sprayed with grease because it is black. I grab the vacuum and start to clean. The black stuff isn’t grease, it’s burnt lint. :eek:
I vacuum the inside and clean it completely. I filled our Dyson vacuum full, had to empty it and filled it again with lint.
So I get it clean and I am scratching my head as to why that much lint had accumulated inside the drier. Even for 18 years this seemed excessive. Finally I noticed that the tube that connected the discharge from the drum to the metal pipe that leads out the back of the unit had come apart and they were not quite pressed together squarely allowing lint to enter the inside of the unit.
After loosening the one piece and a bit of struggle, I got the pipes realigned and connected. All is good now, no more issues.
The PSA portion of this message is, I have heard about lint fires, but I never gave them much thought. I cleaned the lint trap every load and the vent every few years.
My suggestion is, if you can’t recall the last time you cleaned the lint out of your drier, now might be a good time to clean the vent and maybe peek inside the machine.
And even though my hubby thinks I’m paranoid, I don’t run the dryer while we sleep or away from home.
Yikes!
Glad you caught it in time! Might want to tape the seam where those two pipes meet with a high-temp foil tape to prevent those pieces from wiggling apart again. Also would recommend dropping the front every few months and making sure everything is still as it should be.
No kidding.
I once had a rat nest in my washing machine. Cleanup was… unpleasant. First time I’ve ever seen a repairman flee the scene in horror.
Same here. Going to ask my husband to open up the dryer and clean it out with the shop vac this weekend! :eek:
Your dryer may have a bigger problem than a loose vent duct. If anything anywhere in your dryer is getting scorched, then temperatures are way higher than they should be. Dryers are fitted with thermal fuses that are supposed to shut them down if the warm air being fed into the drum gets too hot. If you’ve got burnt lint all over your dryer, then your thermal fuse is somehow not doing its job; either it’s defective, or it was replaced at some time in the past with a hard wire, or there’s somehow a short across it that’s keeping current flowing even though the fuse has melted. If at some point in the future the outlet duct gets blocked, you may indeed have a fire on your hands.
You sound DIY-capable, so I strongly recommend you look into this. Open up your dryer again, and look for an electrical schematic pasted inside there somewhere that will tell you where to find the thermal fuse. Make sure it’s actually there, then test it for continuity (if you had burnt lint all over your dryer, then the fuse should be open-circuit), and see if your dryer runs (or if the drum spins but you don’t get heat) when the fuse is not installed.
A less-alarming alternative is that there is some normally-hot surface (you got a gas dryer, or electric?) outside of the normal air path that was getting dusted by lint from the disconnected ductwork. If that’s the case, then I guess you’ve fixed the problem - but as important as this is, you really do want to investigate that thermal fuse.
The dryer is gas (second line in the OP, promise) - would that normally involve having those hot surfaces outside the drum?
My thermal fuse went out last week and I had to diassemble the drier to access it. I was also shocked at the amount of lint. Mine was from the lint catcher not going all the way down. My daughter in law is the only one to use the drier ad she tends not to push it down all the way allowing lint to bi pass it.
The wife had run the drier, took some stuff out, no smell or smoke. She then turned it on for a couple of minutes more, that is when the fun began.
Due to the low amount of time the drier ran from start up to smoke I don’t think it is a thermal fuse issue.
I will be cleaning the vent tonight.
Duct taped?
Metaphorical, or a real rat nest?
I imagine a mama rat and her babies paddling like hell during the rinse cycle…
Some dryers have rinse cycles? Mine does not.
ps- check the thermalnuclear fuse, too
Neither does mine, he was speaking of a washing machine. 
How long can rats hold their breath?
15 minutes (thanks wiki answers). They can tread water for three days, too. Maybe less in a wash cycle set on sturdy
All I can tell you is I have seen a rat drown over night in a toilet.
But what about those little boats?
The rat was bigger than the boat.
Oh, of course.