(Scrolling down a bit) I didn’t blog about the dryer repair guy? Call it Thumper’s Admonition. He came, he fixed nothing, he called the blackened plug cosmetic and said it wasn’t covered, and he ignored my pointing out the melted lint trap cover that had been far from the wall as proof that the dryer had been getting too hot and random on the timer, and said our wiring had fried the dryer and that it was our fault it had overheated. Charged me $79.95 for refusing to repair the visible damage, refused to even consider that their dryer had scorched my house, said nothing was under the warranty, and walked away.

With a thank you to the Anne who sent me a note about it, I found out that if you turn the dial counter-clockwise on a Speed Queen old fashioned knob style dryer, it breaks the timer and the dryer overheats. It plays equally easily in either direction but you absolutely must only ever turn it clockwise.

How would you ever know? Even if you proclaim, Read the manual!, how would you trust any visiting guests to know that they will destroy the machine and burn down the house if they turn the dial in a direction it’s perfectly happy to turn in?

Today the electrician and his apprentice came for the wiring the dryer had fried.

Turns out that when we added on the laundry room and specified we wanted it wired for an electric dryer, the guy had used aluminum wire to connect it up to the existing copper wire.

You can do that, our new guy said, but you must mark where the change is and it has to be done very very carefully with the right materials. But there’s no marking. There’s no way to know what he did where. (There are other markings on the outside breaker box that were done in pencil and time and exposure have made them illegible. So there’s that.)

He was gratified that Richard knew exactly what he was talking about. (Richard in high school wired his dad’s addition and it passed inspection.)

It had been fine for 31 years till the timer on this dryer started acting funky.

So. The dryer had fried the wiring at the receptacle. Keep it safe. New copper wiring. The choice was to tear out the wall most of the way along one side of the house–or run it out and through a particular type of specialized pipe over the roof. Pipe it is. They were off to go buy it.

It was 88F out there. The job took them about nine hours.

At the end, he had me come in and see the new receptacle. And! There was a new dryer plug and the entire cord it connected to–neither of which he charged us for, he just did it because he could and because what the repairman had done just didn’t feel right to him.

He plugged it in. He had me turn it on. It worked! There was nothing in it so we didn’t leave it on for very long. Off.

And then there was–a sound.

Me, being so deaf, I thought he’d dropped a small tool, and he had, earlier, and he picked it up, but said no, that wasn’t it, it was a big boom, did you hear it? to the other guy coming in just then. He had. Richard was coming around the corner at the other end of the hall just then and said, I heard it!

The two buttons, for power and for steam boost, were now jammed in at the top with nobody having done anything to them.

It couldn’t be turned on again.

His extra charge for that heavy-duty cord and plug and the time spent installing them on our dryer?

Zero.