The Drier That Wouldn't Quit

Jan 21, 2004PM/Home

After a couple months of guessing why my power bill spiked again I think I've finally got it nailed. Yesterday afternoon we took the kids out, and we happened to take note that the drier was running as we were heading out the door. On the way back in, we noticed it was still running. Oh shoot. Quite a bit of time had passed. Yep, the exhaust hose was crimped, but mainly the little flap where the vent exits the house had snagged on a wad of lint. It is supposed to let exhaust air out and keep mice from getting in. It was indeed keeping mice from getting in but it was also keeping most of the exhaust air in. After a bit of de-crimping of the hose and scraping away the lint, a satisfying jet of super humid air was once again flowing.

So much for the nifty new power saving features on driers these days that automatically turn off when the clothes are dry. Under normal, best-case use I'm sure they save energy. But in a bad end-case like we were in, not knowing how long a load takes hides an important piece of feedback that ultimately wastes quite a bit of electricity (and money). Not a robust design. Unfortunately laundry is one of those things that my wife and I hate. And things we hate we tend to not waste any neurons on whatsoever.

Bad family.

Here's a picture of the main drier interface, on our GE model drier. You can select how dry you want the clothes to be but no time cut-off when you do. And there's no feedback about how long the last load ran. One more thing to keep an eye on. I think we need to go back to the old fashioned time based cut off.

IntelliDry needs to be a bit more intelligent. First it needs a sanity cut off, if the clothes aren't dry after a certain duration, stop anyway, something's wrong. And second, display how long the load took to dry, to give that all important feedback. Just like you know something's going wrong with your car when the miles/gallon starts dropping. Of course they don't make that easy to determine in your car either!

Lastly, we really need to pay more attention. We're lucky we didn't start a fire. But our clothes do dry incredibly fast now!