The Appliance Lament

This really has nothing to do with leaving on vacation, but it has a lot to do with leaving on vacation, because these sorts of things always happen just before leaving on vacation.  Some of this has been coming on for some time, it’s just that we gotta address it now, so that things are less likely to break during vacation.

Our clothes dryer is a relic from a few decades ago.  Purchased used on Facebook Marketplace or something like that, it replaced and even older dryer which finally gave up.  We bought this one because it was (a) high capacity, (b) cheap, and (c) available.  We needed it in a hurry.  It has done its job in our basement for a bunch of years.  A couple years ago, the motor burned out.  We thought about getting a new dryer but suffered from sticker shock.  Plus it baffled me why a clothes dryer would need a connection to my WiFi network.  Looking at the disassembled dryer, there really are very few parts to it.  A motor, a source of heat, a drum, and a timer.  Adding WiFi just increased the number of potential failures significantly.  

So I just bought a new motor and put it in.  Problem solved.  Until recently.  It has started to squeak when running.  Sometimes loud enough to be heard through the whole house.  More of a scream than a squeak. 

I usually never heard it.  Probably because I don’t do the laundry.  Deb has been complaining about this for some time.  Usually when I get down there, the squeaking stops. It usually does as the dryer runs and warms up.  Since we are going to be gone for several weeks and someone is still home needing to use the dryer, it became time to fix it, two days before we leave.  So I tore into it.  I found a couple idler rollers getting stiff and dry.  So I got out the wheel bearing grease and generously slathered this thick goo all over the roller shafts.  They spin great now.

If this were a modern digital appliance I would probably be spending $250 to replace a controller board as those tend to fail first.  Instead, I fixed it with grease.  The dryer lives again.

Last night we put our oven through the self-cleaning cycle.  It must have been really dirty as evidenced by the fire burning brightly inside the oven.  We filled the house with smoke and had to open a window and turn on the whole house fan to clear the air.  It was 16 degrees outside and cooled rapidly inside.

This is why we don’t use the self-cleaning cycle very often.  And usually not in 16-degree weather.

This morning we opened the oven to remove any remaining ash and discovered that an inside seam is badly corroded and there are now holes in our oven.  We knew there was a little bit of this going on, but it is now to the point where Deb gets nervous about using it.

It’s two days before we leave on a major road trip and we’re visiting some appliance stores, asking about new wall ovens.

I also spent time looking for a new part.  The inner shell of a wall oven is not something that is replaced regularly and this particular one has been out of production for several years.  So I struck out.  Looks like we’ll be buying a new wall oven.  But that will probably happen when we get back.  Abigail is still home but she doesn’t use the oven all that much.

I looked it up.  We bought this oven on May 31, 2002.  So it’s about 23 1/2 years old.  The saleswoman at Gerritt’s Appliance told us we got good service out of it.  15 to 20 years is the average life.  Deb told her she wanted fifty years.

I have a set of coin-op laundry machines in the basement of our rental property.  I bought them used almost 20 years ago.  The name plate on the dryer puts the manufacture date somewhere around 1982.  They have needed fixing a few times, the most recent when a water valve stopped working on the washer.  I bought the last one at Gerritt’s. They told me they cant get them anymore.  It’s too bad.  These machines are built for the long run and they, like my own dryer, are dirt simple and easy to fix.

The property manager has been on my case for the last few years to replace them with newer machines.  And the lack of parts availability may eventually force me to do just that.  But with newer machines designed to last about 8 years, these 40\+ year old machines are quite superior, even though they don’t have all the modern digital features.  The coin mechanisms top out at $2.00 per load, so I may have to replace something just to set market prices.

So it looks like we may blow the appliance budget this year.  We didn’t even have an appliance budget.  And it’s funny how all this comes to a head just before we leave on a major road trip.