Posted on 03/19/2013 10:42:13 PM PDT by djf
Lately, it seems, there has been a bombardment of news items, public service announcements, and general heightened awareness about of all things...
Home fires caused by clothes dryers!!
Now, I wish I were a younger man, and freely admit to being on a downhill slide towards my 60's. And I don't recall in the 60's,70's, or any previous decade where clothes dryers struck fear and apprehension and general disquiet in the community.
I'm actually running my dryer now and that's what made me wonder about this.
Are dryers more poorly made now? Are they sloppily installed? I mean, as far as tech goes, dryers aren't very far up the list...
OR!
Are there more people who are just brain dead? People who can't take care of things or have to short of an attention span to be able to deal with the complexities of running a clothes dryer? You know, the Twitter types.
Just thought I'd run this by FReepers for their consideration and reflection, we have just about the biggest brain trust on Earth here!
BTW, if the answer is the second choice, how can we expect those folks to understand laws and rights and the Constitution?
If so, we might be doomed!
I believe it- we’re in an era where people cannot distinguish technology from magic. I once participated in a focus group on energy policy and one of the people insisted that electricity should be free because it costs nothing to produce.
I wouldn't know. My wife and I have used the same dryer for our family of six for over fifteen years now. It was used when we got it. Runs fine.
Some of us are old enough to remember when almost no one had a clothes dryer in their house. If I had a dollar for every basket of clothes I hung on the line as a kid....
Course it is, else how will I make my Prius go?
I kept repairing our old top loader washing machine for years when various things would go bad (thermostat, some relay switch, a gear a few times). The internet is wonderful - especially the following site:
The last time it went down it was the motor. And my wife figured instead of me fixing it for $200 she wanted a front-end loader. After two-years of the fancy one, she wished we had held onto our 21 year-old one.
In another 2-4 years when the new one breaks and is probably too complicated for me to fix - I’ll wish we had the old one too!
There’s nothing like the smell of clothes that have been line-dried in the sunshine.
As some here have already pointed out, most fires that start when the dryer is being used are due to lint build up. How do you avoid that? Well, first never use those stretchy, plastic-and-coiled wire vent hoses. They invite lint build up and are hard to clean out. Always use metal vent ducts. Keep the run as short and straight as possible. Use 45 degree bends instead of 90s wherever possible. And clean them out occasionally. Once a year is more than enough for me, but I live alone and don't do an enormous amount of laundry. And if your clothes seem to take an awfully long time to completely dry, that is a sign that something is wrong, and a partially clogged vent can cause that by reducing airflow.
So how can a dryer catch fire when it isn't running? The heating coil operates on 230 volts AC which is achieved by connecting it across two 115 volt sources that are 180 degrees out of phase. When one leg is 115 volts positive, the other is 115 volts negative. The voltage across the heating coil is the algebraic sum of the voltages on the two legs. The control circuits, motor, and blower use 115 volts to ground. Only one leg of the heating circuit is broken when the dryer turns off. If the heating coil breaks it may contact ground, you will then have 115 volts going through it. If there is no airflow over the heating coil, it may overheat and set the clothes on fire.
If you want to prevent this, you could install a shutoff switch above the dryer. A subpanel box with space for a set of paired breakers would work fine. Of course, you still have to remember to turn it off after running the dryer. Maybe you could find a unit with some kind of timer.
------------------------------
As we say in the biz, if you really don't want something to burn, sprinkle it.
You just made me recall that smell! I agree. I can even recall the smell of my mom ironing shirts and dresses after they came off the line.
Kids these days don't know the pleasure of wearing freshly washed and ironed dress clothes with spit shined dress shoes. Made you feel special for a while - then it was time to change into play clothes and hit the street :-)
I’m not sure how common dryers were in the 60s. (We were still using a clothesline- which I miss, btw, until about 1968 or 69). But as the wife of an insurance adjuster *and* the daughter of someone who had a dryer fire, there are 2 things that everyone should ALWAYS do:
Clean the lint filter before every load. NEVER leave your dryer going when no one is home. (We don’t even use it when we’re going to be asleep)
When I first married, DH had a claim in a very upscale neighborhood off of IH10.
I want to say the man of the house was a sheriff or some official- in other words, no dummy. They left for work with their dryer going & it burned their home literally to the ground. Their little dog died in the fire.
My mom was meticulous about the lint filter, but somehow, a washcloth got lodged in the filter or some kind of vent through the dryer tub & caught fire. If she hadn’t been there, it could have destroyed her apartment & the other 3 in her building because it was at the back of a large property. Again, pets would have been lost. I’ll never forget the fireman holding that half burned washcloth.
PS You can buy dryer cleaning kits at Home Depot or Lowes. They work great & they’re cheap. One of the brushes is for cleaning the tube that goes from the outlet to the roof (or outside).
And whiter too.
My niece checked the oil in her grand am. She saw no oil on the stick, so she added 5 quarts. The engine was sort of hopping until I drained out about 5 quarts. Turns out her oil was clean so she didn’t see the level on the stick.
I don't think you're quite right on this. I was a valunteer fireman in the '60s and early '70s, and the three most common fires were from:
(1) grass fires from burning your waste paper outside on a windy day;
(2) dryer/lint fires from fumes issuing from overheated rubber-based falsie bras; and
(3) smoldering sofa or bed fires from cigarettes, which didn't erupt into flames until halfway through the night.
Of course, battery-driven smoke detectors were not yet invented then ---
Yes, it’s true that freshly dried clothes hung on the line are nice. . but, there’s also that winter thing where you put clothes on the line in winter; then when you bring them in they’re frozen stiff as a board and still wet when you hang them all over the house. Sigh.
Being a native Californio, I didn't grow up with snow. Never even occurred to me that people would hang clothes out to dry in the frozen winter.
What's the point of hanging them out to 'dry', if they're soaking wet with ice when you bring them in?
Or, you can take it apart, reach in and clean out the hose. It's not hard.
I had to look it up because I couldn't remember..."...members of Microsoft's Excel development team said the flaw occurs during calculations that would ordinarily result in, or be close to, the number 65,535. Instead, Excel produces a result of 100,000..."
We can thank liberals for that.
Running clothes washers and dryers used to be “women’s work”. With more men washing, drying and even ironing their own clothes, you’d think these “saving you from yourselves” media reports would be unnecessary but the media DOES want us to believe that they are the go-to people for all the information we need to avoid killing ourselves, however unwittingly...not to mention what brand of yoga pants women should not wear!
We always had several dryers, strung from tree to tree in the backyard.
Houses in the old days were pretty drafty, so the indoor winter humidity was really low. Clothes hung indoors dried pretty fast IIRC.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.