Although dryers are simple, lots can go wrong with them. When this happens, your clothes might not come out fully dry. Luckily, in many cases there are easy fixes you can implement yourself, to get your dryer back in working order.
Here are some ways to fix a dryer that won’t dry clothes, or to improve its efficiency if it’s
Reduce Your Load Size
Today’s washing machines are cavernous, and can easily handle a giant bedspread, plus a few days worth of clothes. Because manufacturers want you to buy their washers and dryers together, they often make their dryer’s chamber the same size as the washer’s, so they look nice paired together. This creates that impression that you can do a giant load of laundry in the washer, load it right into the dryer, and get dry clothes.
That’s often not the case. Whereas modern washers can handle a nearly full drum of laundry, dryers can often handle much less. Why? In order to dry properly, the clothes in your dryer need to be constantly moving around — being carried up to the top of the dryer by the spinning drum, falling down through a torrent of hot air, and repeating the process until they’re dry.
If you overfill your dryer, the clothes just kind of mush around in there. You don’t get the churning, falling action and airflow which they need in order to come out fully dry. Your dryer will run for much longer, and even with infinite run time, it may not fully dry certain items.
Instead of dumping everything from your washer into your dryer, split your washed clothes into several smaller loads. Once you start the dryer, check to make sure there’s ample room for your clothes to be carried up by the drum and to fall back down. You’ll likely find that your dryer takes way less time per load, and that your clothes come out much dryer.
Just because your washer has a certain capacity, that doesn’t mean your dryer can keep up.
Use Timed Dry (or investigate a broken sensor)
Lots of modern dryers use a humidity sensor to determine when your clothes are done drying. This sensor looks at the humidity of the air exiting your dryer. When it drops below a certain level, the dryer assumes that your clothes are dry and stops its cycle automatically.
Sensor drying is great for the environment because it reduces unnecessary run time. But sometimes your sensor can be wrong about how dry your clothes actually are. This can happen if your have a big load, and certain items in the middle of the load aren’t as dry as those on the outside. It can also happen if you and your sensor differ in your opinions on how dry is “dry enough”. I like my clothes totally dry, but many sensors are set to stop when clothes are damp-dry, to avoid damaging them by drying for too long.
If your sensor gets things wrong for a specific load, try running your dryer again on the Timed Dry setting. This setting lets you manually specify an amount of time your dryer should run. With it, you can dial in a specific run time based on the load size and dampness, or you can let it run for a long time and check in periodically until the load is done.
If your sensor seems to get things wrong all the time, call in a pro to check if it’s broken. Sometimes sensors wear down over time (they’re constantly being blasted with hot, watery air after all) and a simple swap-out can make your dryer work like new again.
Dry Big Items Separately
Even if you’re doing properly sized loads, big items like comforters, sheet sets, etc. can mess up your dryer’s performance. Why? As the drum spins, they tend to wrap themselves around smaller items, trapping those items in a knotted mass of fabric and preventing them from fully drying.
If your mixed loads of big and small items are coming out damp, try drying bedspreads, sheets, and other large items separately, and then doing another load for your smaller items.
Clean Lint Screens
These one might seem obvious, but you’d be amazed how often people forget to clean their dryer’s lint screen — or have no idea it exists in the first place. Dryers use a lint screen to prevent lint, dust, bits of fabric and the like from blowing off your clothes and clogging the air outlet. But for your dryer to work properly, you have to clean the lint screen frequently — ideally between every load. Otherwise, airflow is reduced and your clothes come out damp.
Check your dryer’s manual (or do a quick Youtube search for its model number) to see how to clean its screen. Usually the screen has a pull-out handle just below the door, or in a separate compartment on top of the dryer for many front-loading machines. You don’t need to wash the screen with water each time — a quick removal of the lint will do. A Swiffer cloth works great to grab lint from your screen.
Resist the temptation to remove your lint screen entirely. A lint-filled outflow tube will reduce performance and can be a fire hazard.
Clean Air Inlets and Outlets
If your dryer consistently struggles to dry clothes — even on timed dry — a blocked air inlet or outlet might be to blame. Again, to dry your clothes, a dryer blows how air through the drum, and then exhausts it out through a tube into the outdoors.
If either the input or the output gets blocked with lint, your dryer’s performance can suffer. When the dryer is cool, grab as much of the lint out of these areas as possible. Make sure to check the inflow screen in the back of the dryer — if it gets clogged up, hot air can’t flow in properly. You can use a vacuum cleaner to get the lint out.
Check, too, that the outflow pipe is still properly connected to the wall behind your dryer, and that there’s no kinks or breaks which are disrupting airflow. Even a small bend — which can happen if the dryer moves around on the floor — can restrict airflow and reduce drying performance.
These tips can fix a broken dryer, but they’re also great for reducing the energy consumption of a dryer which is otherwise working well. Cleaning lint out routinely, vacuuming your air inflow and drying smaller loads can do wonders to reduce your overall run time and energy use.
If none of those tips work for you, it’s time to call in a pro. But in most cases, applying these simple fixes will get your dryer working properly again — and get your clothes nice and dry.