The Death of the Dryer
2 October 2005
You know you are hard up for blog material when you realize the most interesting thing that happened to you all week is that you bought a new dryer and you are blogging about it! Yes, folks, it is time for the next, much-anticipated installment of blondelibrarian’s long list of domestic disasters… the death of the dryer!
Last weekend, in the midst of our comforter-cleaning fiasco, my dryer died. It wasn’t completely unexpected, but still it was rather inconvenient: Not directly because of the comforter mind you, for like the washing machine, the comforter wouldn’t fit into the dryer either. However, because it wouldn’t fit into the dryer, the comforter was drying on my one and only drying rack when I came to the conclusion on Saturday that after three hours in the dryer my regular laundry was still wet. After an amateur investigation by A. and myself, we came to the conclusion that the heating element in our dryer was dead.
Now, you may ask why not get a professional opinion and then get the dryer repaired? Well, my answer would be because the dryer died on us once before and we had it repaired. It was still under warranty at that time, but the warranty expired about a year and a half ago. Therefore, this time we realized that by the time we paid a repairman to come and look at the dryer and tell us if it could be fixed (or not) and then paid to have it fixed, we might as well buy a new dryer… after all, the in-laws offered to buy a new one for us anyway!
Now, of course, as the faithful readers of this blog might suspect, there is something more to the story than just dryer-dies-and-dryer-is-replaced… because in Germany there are two types of dryers: First, there is your regular run-of-the-mill dryer where you attach a hose to a hole in your wall and the hot air is blown out. Lots of people do not have these types of dryers here because holes in the walls of houses for the dryer exhaust are not as easy to cut into a solid brick wall as they are wooden and/or dry-walled walls.
The second option one has when it comes to dryers in Germany is a condensing dryer. As the name suggests, these dryers work by condensing the water out of your laundry and collecting it into a little bucket that one must empty. Theoretically these dryers work almost as well as a good old-fashioned dryer (they take longer to dry the same amount of clothing) and since one doesn’t have to have an exhaust portal, can be installed anywhere.
Since our building doesn’t have an opening in the wall for a “regular” dryer, I had (and will be getting) a condensing one. However, the problem is since they have more complicated machinery, condensing dryers are also more prone to dying at the most inconvenient times… like when your comforter is drying on your drying rack, leaving two loads of wet laundry in their laundry baskets because they have no other place to dry.
Now, given the lack of exhaust holes in the walls and the short life of condensing dryers, it appears that many Germans choose the third option of drying their clothing: They skip the dryer all together and merely hang their clothes on drying racks or on clothes lines until they are dry.
I briefly flirted with this idea last week, but it quickly lost its appeal when I realized that by drying my laundry in this manner my bedroom would indefinitely be turned into a laundry room. After the first load I also remembered why I don’t even hang my clothes out on the balcony in the summer, and that is because I really, really hate the resulting stiffness of clothes that are hung up to dry! It only took three stiff loads of laundry before I had A. at the store arranging delivery for my new dryer (which should be here around the middle of the week) and until it gets here I am not washing (or drying) any more clothes!
