Stocking: Fixing a dryer, a little extra wi-fi, and my boy becomes a man
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It only took me two days and two loads of laundry spread out across dining room chairs and the sofa before I figured out that the heating element in my dryer had gone out. No problem, I thought. I’ve heard people talk about replacing heating elements in their dryers. I figured it couldn’t be too hard.
I gathered my right-hand man (also known as my 16-year-old son, Tanner) and googled “how to replace the heating element” for my specific dryer manufacturer. A short video (5 minutes and 34 seconds) by How-to Bob proved very informative and showed us exactly what to do from beginning to end. Tanner and I high-fived. We could do this.
The next step was finding a heating element. Who knew they were so hard to find? Nobody carries them in stock, but they can sure order them in for me. Well, I can order them, too. Amazon is cheaper and faster. That little process meant no laundry at my house for a few days. My kids were so happy.
The new heating element arrived on a Monday, and after dinner, we set to work. Tanner gathered the socket set from the garage and unplugged the dryer. At this point, I was along for moral support and flashlight holding. Tanner began by taking off the front panel and then sent me to fetch the vacuum. How-to-Bob’s video told us this was a good time to vacuum out the lint collected in the dryer. I now understand why so many house fires start in the laundry room. (I feel like I need to make a public service announcement here: Clean the lint out of your dryers, people!)
The next step was removing metal plates so we could get to the dead element. Tanner asked me to pull up the video again. How-to-Bob had a handy little — very little — ratchet which fit in that tiny space so nicely. We did not have a tiny little ratchet. Our ratchet was too big. I was getting discouraged, but not Tanner. No, he was feeling the manliness of the project and headed back out to the garage, returning with a pair of pliers. He stuck those pliers through the small hole in the plate and grabbed onto the bolt and slowly started moving that bolt lefty-loosie. When that bolt was finally out, we had to release the bolt holding the heating element in place. Once we maneuvered that bolt out, we were on the home stretch!
Except that we weren’t because we couldn’t get the electrical connectors off the deceased element. This project was now 15 times longer than How-to-Bob’s video. I left Tanner to figure it out and went to put my little guy to bed. I was trying to figure out what we needed to do to excise that dead element when I went back to the laundry room and found Tanner screwing in the bolt to hold the new element in place. He did it! I was just starting to cheer when he said, “Mom! We aren’t done yet.” That little bolt still had to go back through that little hole in the plate and be slowly screwed into place by a pair of pliers going righty-tightie.
Tanner sat on his rear end in front of the lint-free dryer moaning and groaning about little bolts and the wrong tools until he finally looked up at me: “Mom, can I have thirty extra minutes of wifi tonight?” Then, looking back at the dryer, he said, “I feel like I’m in prison asking for special privileges.”
Prison, no. Learning environment, yes. Someday his wife will inform him that the clothes dryer isn’t drying, and Tanner will know exactly what to do. He’ll know to unplug the dryer first. He’ll know to have a flashlight and the vacuum close buy. He’ll know to buy a teeny-tiny ratchet when he buys that new heating element. In summary, Tanner replaced a heating element in my clothes dryer. However, doing so caused me to replace the little boy image of my son with the image of a man. Thirty extra minutes of wifi is worth growing a man.