Dryer taking two cycles

Check one: is it posting a code?

Begin here, because it is the single most dependable indicator available and hardly anyone gets told about it.

A dryer throwing a code is the vent about 95 percent of the time.

Current machines are good at catching this. The control board keeps track of cycle length and exhaust temperature, and when a restriction pushes those two readings out of agreement it posts a fault or ends the cycle early. Every brand labels it differently. The condition underneath is always identical, which is that the exhaust cannot get out of the building.

What generally follows is an appliance technician, a service charge, and the news that the dryer is in good order and the duct is packed. It is a common sequence and an avoidable one. Look at the vent before paying anybody to open up the machine.

Older equipment has no such monitoring. It simply runs hot and takes two cycles until a component gives out, which is a large part of why the neglect in the original Ahwatukee housing goes unnoticed for so long.

Check two: the airflow test

Set the machine to air fluff, the no-heat option, and start it. Go outside to the termination and hold a hand near it.

Strong, steady flow. Your duct is clear, cleaning it will change nothing, and the fault is inside the appliance. That is an appliance technician's job, not ours.

Weak flow, or none. The duct is restricted, which is the entire thing we do, and it is $99.

Where the termination is on the roof and unreachable, do it from inside instead. Draw the machine out, uncouple the duct at the back of it, and run a single load with nothing attached. A load that dries normally that way points at the duct. Open a window first, because you are putting lint and moisture into the room.

Both checks together take about two minutes and cost nothing. Do them before ringing anybody, ourselves included.

If it is the duct, what is in there?

Compacted lint, usually

Most of our callouts. The deterioration is slow enough that a household adapts around it without registering the change. An occasional second cycle becomes a usual one, then a mandatory one, and no particular day exists on which something visibly failed.

The timescale depends on where in the village you are. A two-story in The Foothills with a thirty-five foot roof run can get there inside three years. A single-story in the original streets might take fifteen, and quite often the honest answer is "since it was built."

A folded or collapsed transition hose

Two versions here. In the newest builds it is a space problem, where shutting the closet doors folds the hose flat. In the original housing it is age, with the foil having gone brittle and given way on its own. Either way it chokes the system at its narrowest point, well before anything in the duct matters.

Something nesting in the cap

Abrupt rather than gradual. If it was fine last month and hopeless now, and it is anywhere from February to May, start there. Backing the preserve makes this considerably more likely. Full page.

A run that came apart

Common in the older Ahwatukee housing where joints were taped rather than fixed and the tape has had five decades to fail. The appliance is now discharging hot damp lint-laden air into the building. You often smell it before finding it, and there may be marking on drywall near the laundry.

Dust-bound deposits

Specific to the dust-exposed streets, particularly around Club West and the preserve boundary. Caliche binds into lint and produces something denser and more adherent than lint alone, which resists the kind of half-hearted cleaning a blower produces.

The exterior flap seized shut

Fifty years of unshaded sun on the original housing does this. They deform, the hinge locks, and they stop lifting. Run the machine and watch the flap from outside. If it does not move, that is the whole problem.

What it is doing to the appliance

Every dryer carries a thermal fuse meant to cut power before things overheat. A restriction has it intervening as a matter of routine while the heating element works well beyond its intended range, so the machine is straining on every load it runs.

The outcome is that dryers die young and owners conclude they bought a poor one. Usually they bought a perfectly good one and never opened the duct. A replacement runs eight hundred to fifteen hundred. The clean is $99.

Source: National Fire Protection Association, Home Fires Involving Clothes Dryers and Washing Machines.

We will tell you when it is not us

Worth stating plainly, since it is why both checks sit at the top of this page rather than the bottom.

If you ring us and the duct turns out to be clear, we are not going to clean it anyway and invoice you $99. You get told it is the appliance and pointed at somebody who repairs appliances. That costs us the job and it remains the right call.

What we do about it

1. Work out what you have. We trace the route, look at the exterior cap or the roof hood, and check the flexible section behind the appliance. On the hillside lots especially, the run is often not where people assume it is.
2. Outside first, machine running. The dryer stays powered up the entire time we are at the termination, so its own exhaust pushes whatever we loosen out and clear of the duct instead of letting it settle back into the run. It throws lint around outside. Clearing that up is part of the job.
3. Then inside. Power off, hose uncoupled, appliance drawn away from the wall. The brush goes into the vent from this end, the freed material comes down toward us, and the vacuum takes it out of the cavity.
4. Two ends when the run earns it. A long route with several bends gets worked from both directions, since a brush entering from one side never properly reaches the far half. A short straight run does not, and we will say so instead of inventing work.
5. Back together, and you look at it. Appliance reconnected and run, and the material we pulled out left in front of you.

How often it needs doing

Ten months is the interval for an ordinary household. Treat that as a maintenance schedule rather than a nudge.

• Every 10 months in a typical Ahwatukee home
• Every 4 to 6 months where the house is full and the machine runs most days
• Monthly on commercial equipment

Plenty of people here treat a slow dryer as the cue to call somebody. By then you are not approaching the interval, you went past it roughly a year ago. Slow drying is what surfaces after months of restricted airflow have already been working on the appliance, not the point at which the problem starts.

Common questions