When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras

I’ve always enjoyed the saying “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.” Its origin is in medical training, I believe, but it’s something I try to keep in mind when trying to solve just about any problem, technical or otherwise. Start with the simplest explanation and work from there. Here’s a story about how I wasted a bunch of time not doing that when my dryer broke.

Facebook recently reminded me that a year ago, my dryer stopped working. The timing on this was impressively bad, as I’d just thrown in an extra wet load. My washing machine had apparently not spun enough to wring out the wet sheets and I needed to keep the loads cycling. The light came on when I opened the door. It beeped like it was going to start when I hit the button, but it didn’t actually do anything. Not good. It was Sunday morning. No repair places were even open to help me triage, let alone fix it. Since I was in a place where I had more time than money, and the appliance repair folks wanted $90 just to come out and tell me what was wrong before even quoting me a price to actually repair it, I figured it was worth at least a little bit of time trying to figure it out on my own. Plus, I love a good tinker.

After I hung the incredibly wet laundry on my clothesline in the backyard, the first thing I did was grab my laptop and hit up the ol’ Google box, trying various forms of “dryer beeps but doesn’t start” plus the make and model of my 20-year old dryer.

A quick aside: I bought this washer and dryer when I bought my house. I had a little bit of money left over from what I’d set aside for the closing and I went to the Sears appliance center, just like my parents had taught me, and proceeded to make a sales-guy’s day. I told him, “This is going to be the easiest sale you make all month. I want the most badass washer and dryer you’ve got.” I felt like such an adult.

The internet is full of DIY sites that will happily tell you how to diagnose problems with whatever appliance you’re having trouble with. But as anyone who’s ever looked up something they’re an expert on via the internet should know, I did my best to be skeptical and validate whatever info I found. I spent a couple of hours digging through everything I could find to try to suss out what the most common problems people had with this dryer were.

The most common recurring failure people posted about was a fuse failure. Many posts explained how to test fuses, so I pinged a friend and borrowed a multimeter in order to test the fuses. I watched a YouTube video about how to use a multimeter to test fuses. This was my first rabbit hole. The fuses were fine.

So I kept going, slowly and methodically taking apart the entire dryer and testing each increasingly less common problem. I found and downloaded the service manual and read it cover to cover. I found a truly frightening amount of lint in the bottom of my dryer. Seriously, everyone should take apart their dryer and vacuum out that lint. It’s astonishing. And kinda gross.

Several hours later I wasn’t actually any closer to figuring out what was wrong and the laundry hanging in the yard was still very very wet. I needed to do something if I was going to have sheets to sleep on that night. It was at this point I broke out of recluse mode and leaned into my rep as the neighborhood weirdo and asked my neighbors if I could use their dryer. Thank goodness they’re used to this sort of behavior from me and were very gracious.

The last and least common problem on the list was that it was a motor problem. There was no significant evidence of it being a motor problem, like the smell you’d expect when a motor burns out, but by now I was a dryer repair expert and that was pretty much all that was left. If I had to replace the motor, I was probably just going to have to buy a new dryer, which was a bummer. The motor is also located behind the drum, which was one of the reasons I’d put it off until last.

So back to the internet I go to understand how to remove the drum so I could get at the motor. I didn’t really know what I’d do with it once I got there, but it seemed like the next thing to do. The drum belt is attached by a vaguely intimidating system of pulleys that keep it under tension, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to lose a finger or something silly like that. Once armed with as much info as possible about how the thing is held together, I put my work gloves back on and went to remove the belt. But first I decided to make sure it could still move at all before I got down there and sorted the pulleys out, so I put my hand on the top of the drum and gave it a push to see what kind of resistance I was dealing with, because if the motor was truly locked up, I figured it wouldn’t move at all. And you know what happened?

The drum belt slid right off.

It wasn’t attached at all, because the weight of the super wet and heavy laundry had caused the 20-year-old drum belt to snap.

It was easy enough to look up the part number and realize there was absolutely nothing I could do about it until the next day since the parts store wasn’t open on Sundays and Home Depot doesn’t keep drum belts for 20 year old Kenmores just sitting around, but at least I finally had a plan. So I spent the evening worrying that I’d never get it all put back together correctly, and the next morning I went to the parts store and picked up a $15 belt. 20 minutes later the dryer was reassembled and working like a champ.

Every little thing like this is an opportunity to learn and build your instincts for problem solving. If the drum isn’t moving like it’s supposed to, try moving the drum by hand. Seems simple and intuitive, but it’s easy to send yourself down a google-hole trying to solve the problem before you actually know what the problem is. Horses not zebras. But hey, at least now I know how my dryer works.