c/appliance-repairers

Went to inspect a used washer in St. Louis and found something odd

I drove out to a house in St. Louis yesterday to look at a used washer for a client, and the drum had this sticky film all over it that smelled like burnt sugar. Took me 20 minutes with a degreaser and hot water to get it off, but now I'm wondering if it was from a dryer sheet or something worse. Has anyone else run into weird residue inside a washer drum that wasn't just mold or soap build up?

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verafoster•2d ago

Old timer's tip about dryer thermostats, I was dead wrong

So this retired HVAC guy, Ed, told me at a parts counter in Akron that most dryer no-heat calls aren't the element, it's the high-limit thermostat creeping out of spec. I laughed it off because I'd replaced two elements that week and figured he was just old school. Finally had a customer whose element looked perfect, ohmed out fine, and I was stumped. I remembered what Ed said, popped the thermostat in my freezer for 10 minutes, and sure enough it read open at 45 degrees instead of closing like it should. That one $14 part fixed a job I would've misdiagnosed and called back on. Now I check those thermostats first before I even touch the element, saved me at least three callbacks since. Anyone else have a stubborn habit that a seasoned guy had to shake you out of?

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noranguyen•4d ago

Finally stopped fighting flex hoses on dryers, took me 14 years to get it right

Tbh I used to wrestle with those metal flex vent hoses on every dryer install. I would spend 20 minutes trying to get the clamp on straight and still end up with a kink. Last month I switched to cutting the hose with aviation snips instead of trying to bend it into place. Now I measure twice, cut once, and use a short rigid connector between the dryer and the wall. Whole job takes me 8 minutes now instead of half an hour. Has anyone else found a simpler trick for tight laundry rooms?

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jana_ellis95•5d ago

Customer told me her dryer was haunted, turned out to be a dead mouse

Had a lady in Akron swear her dryer was possessed because it kept making thumping noises at 2am. Opened the vent line and pulled out a mummified mouse that must have crawled in months ago. Anyone else got a "supernatural" call that ended up being something dumb like this?

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sethh58•8d ago

Factory parts or aftermarket, what's your line?

I got a call last week from a lady in Parma with a fridge that was cycling nonstop. Found a bad defrost thermostat. OEM part was 45 bucks and 4 days out. Aftermarket was 18 bucks and same day from the local supply shop. I went aftermarket because she had a freezer full of food. It's been 6 days and it's working fine so far. But I've been burned before. That $12 aftermarket timer for a dryer took a dump after 2 months, had to go back and eat the labor. So what do you all do? Stick with OEM even if it means the customer waits, or grab the cheaper part and hope? Has anyone had an aftermarket part that lasted longer than the original?

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christopher713•11d ago

Shoutout to the community shop in Fargo for keeping parts bins organized

I stopped by a rental property repair in Fargo last Tuesday and the landlord had a small parts shop set up in the garage. Every drawer was labeled with the model number and date, most from the last 3 years. It made my dryer fix a 20 minute job instead of a 2 hour hunt. Has anyone else run into a homeowner that actually keeps a decent parts inventory?

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ericgonzalez•11d ago

Noticed a laundromat in Tulsa running old-school Maytags, got a fix idea

Stopped at a Coin-Op on 11th Street in Tulsa last Tuesday because a buddy needed change, and I spotted five Maytag washers from the mid-80s still going strong. One had a slow drain issue, so I peeked at the pump screen and it was packed with lint, cleared it in 2 minutes for the owner. Has anyone else seen old commercial units like that and found simple fixes beat replacing them?

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the_elizabeth•12d ago

That 3 day stretch where every dryer vent was full of birds nests

Last Tuesday through Thursday was brutal. First call was a condo in Austin, dryer taking 3 cycles to dry a load. Opened the exterior vent flap and a whole sparrow nest fell out, had 4 chicks in it. Then Wednesday I got two more calls with the same issue, one had a snake skin in the duct. Thursday the last one was a restaurant dryer vent clogged with lint and feathers, took me 2 hours with my rotary brush kit to clear it. I ended up charging extra for the animal cleanup on two of them. Is it just me or are birds getting worse about nesting in vents this year, anyone else seeing a spike in these calls?

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evan_jenkins•13d ago

Tried my gauges against a cheap manifold, no contest on a fridge line

I swapped my old analog set for a digital manifold on a 410A charge last Tuesday and the superheat readings were spot on versus the dials being off by 4 degrees, anyone else find digital worth the upfront cash or am I just lucky so far?

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terrym45•20d ago

Serious question, are we overcharging for diagnostic fees or underselling ourselves?

I've been doing this trade for 8 years in Cleveland, and I keep seeing guys slap a flat $75 diagnostic fee on everything from a bad door switch to a dead control board. Last month I did a call where the customer had already paid two other techs $60 each just to tell her the washer needed a $12 belt. She was furious, and honestly I can't blame her. But at the same time, I've got bills to pay and travel time eats my day, so I charge $85 and I know that's on the high end for this area. The part that gets me is when a new guy charges $50 just to open the door, finds nothing, and leaves the customer stranded with a worse taste in their mouth. So which is it, are we pricing like car dealerships and scaring people off, or are we finally charging what our time is worth? Has anyone here tested raising their fee and seen call volume drop, or do customers just stop calling the cheap guys first and respect you more?

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uma_webb28•21d ago

Took a 20 year old fridge apart in Tulsa and the evaporator fan was held in with a zip tie from a previous tech

I laughed at that zip tie for about ten minutes until I realized it had been holding perfectly for 7 years, so I put a new one back in and now I wonder how many of us are quietly running the same kind of field fix, has anyone else found a hack job that actually worked better than the factory part?

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kevin_martin•21d ago

Just found out why those 10 year old fridges keep dying, it's the condenser fan motor capacitor all along

Pulled a service manual for a 2014 model the other day and it said the cap is rated for 10,000 hours but the fan motor housing is sealed so the heat kills it at 8,000, so I'm wondering how many units I've replaced that only needed a 12 dollar part, anyone else seen this stat in their training docs?

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evan295•22d ago

PSA: Those cheap control board testers on Amazon are lying to you

Picked up one of those $18 universal control board testers last month just to check a suspected bad relay on a Whirlpool washer. Turns out the thing reads continuity fine but totally misses shorted triacs, so I called the board bad, ordered a $140 replacement, and it still didn't run. Ended up tracing the actual fault to a burnt solder joint on the main harness connector, which the tester never would have caught anyway. Has anyone else had one of these give a false pass, or am I just unlucky with the batch from that seller in Ohio?

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kim_patel89•23d ago

Whirlpool washer drum wobble, fixed after a bracket swap in a hotel laundry

Last month I was doing a callback in a Marriott basement, their Whirlpool duet was shaking like crazy. I pulled the top expecting a counterweight issue, but the spider bracket had hairline cracks on two arms. Took me about 2 hours with a puller and a new bracket, but the drum spun smooth after. Anyone else seen these brackets fail more often on front loaders that run constant hotel cycles?

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the_drew•25d ago

Hit 500 dryer vent cleanings last month, had no idea that was coming

I keep a simple tally in my service van, just a cheap spiral notebook from the True Value in Joliet, and somehow I crossed 500 jobs on October 18th without noticing until I flipped back through the pages. That number shocked me because I only started full time in 2021, so it works out to about 140 per year and I'm not even the busiest guy in our shop. 500 cleanings means roughly 500 potential fires I either stopped or caught early, which makes the repetitive part of pulling lint out of a metal tube feel way more worth it. Has anyone else kept a running count and got surprised by their own numbers, or am I just weirdly obsessed with tracking everything?

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jamie_taylor•28d ago

Two years of fixing dryers and I finally get why people misuse the lint screen

I've been doing appliance repair around Columbus for about two years now. Most dryer calls I go on turn out to be a clogged vent or a bad thermal fuse. But I keep noticing something else. Homeowners are washing their lint screens in the sink with soap and water. They think it keeps the screen clean. The problem is it leaves a film that blocks air flow, and then they blame the dryer for taking three cycles to dry a load. I finally had a customer show me her routine last Tuesday, and it clicked. She'd been doing it for years because a blog said to. I told her to just brush it off with the soft brush on her vacuum hose or rub it under running water with no soap, then let it dry completely before putting it back. She called me back two days later saying her clothes dry in one cycle now. Has anyone else run into this, or is it just a Midwest thing? Am I missing another common misuse I should warn people about?

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janab82•29d ago

Hit 1,000 completed dryer vent cleanings and the last one showed me something scary

I pulled a massive lint clog out of a unit in Phoenix yesterday, and when I counted my logbook it was number 1,000, but that success rate means I've probably missed clogs on 50 or more jobs before I got good at checking behind the drum, so has anyone else tracked their failure rate that way?

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burns.fiona•1mo ago

Discovered a magnet trick for retrieving lost screws in washing machines

Had a customer in Austin call about a clicking noise in their washer, pulled the drum and found a random screw wedged near the drain pump. Tried a pick and needle nose pliers for 20 minutes, zero luck. Anyone else use a telescoping magnet wand to fish out small debris before tearing the whole unit apart?

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andrew_miller90•1mo ago

Customer told me my Samsung fridge diagnostic was lazy

A guy in Cicero pointed out I was just cycling the main board without checking the evaporator fan first. He showed me how to jump the thermistor to test it directly, and now I catch bad fans on the first trip instead of guessing. It saves me about 45 minutes per call on RF23 models. Anyone else run into a trick like that from a homeowner?

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olivia_murphy•1mo ago

Had to decide between fixing my old dryer drum vs buying a new machine last month

The drum bearing went out on my 12 year old Whirlpool and I was looking at $280 in parts plus my time to swap it. Ended up going with a used unit off Facebook Marketplace for $150 from a guy in Arlington and it's been running fine for 3 weeks now. Has anyone else rolled the dice on used appliances vs repairing the old one?

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piperr58•1mo ago

Took me 4 hours to find a clogged drain hose on a Whirlpool dishwasher

The thing was drying fine but leaving water in the sump, and I chased a bad check valve for 3 hours before noticing the hose had a tiny kink right where it meets the disposal. Has anyone else had a hidden kink waste their whole afternoon?

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martin.angela•1mo ago

Tried to fix a dryer that was taking too long and made things way worse

I was at a rental house in Oak Park last Saturday trying to fix a dryer that was taking 3 cycles to dry a load. I replaced the heating element and the thermal fuse but somehow managed to strip the wire connectors so bad they wouldn't stay attached. Has anyone else had a simple fix snowball into a bigger headache like that?

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karen_nelson40•1mo ago

That Samsung ice maker issue is almost always the diverter flap getting stuck

I kept seeing people swap out whole ice maker assemblies on these Samsung fridges and the problem comes back in like 3 months. It's not the ice maker itself most of the time. The real issue is the diverter flap in the auger housing gets gunked up with ice buildup and won't close all the way. Then warm air gets into the ice bin and causes clumping. I figured this out after my fourth call on a 2021 model in Dallas where the guy had already paid for a new ice maker. I just cleaned the flap area with a hair dryer and some isopropyl alcohol and it worked perfect for 6 months now. Have you guys had better luck just cleaning that flap instead of replacing the whole assembly?

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charliehill•1mo ago

TIL dipping a dryer thermistor in ice water gives a way better reading than a multimeter alone

I had this Whirlpool dryer last Tuesday that kept cutting out after 10 minutes. Meter said the thermistor was fine at room temp but I wasn't convinced. An old-timer at the supply house told me to dunk it in ice water and test again - sure enough the resistance barely budged. But here's the debate: does this trick actually save you from misdiagnosing bad parts, or is it just extra work when a good meter and a wiring diagram do the same thing? Curious if anyone else has burned time swapping a part that tested good warm but failed cold.

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amybarnes•1mo ago

Can we talk about that one customer who watched me fix their dryer and actually learned something

Honestly, I still think about this lady in Nashville who called me out to fix her Samsung dryer for the third time in a year. She pulled up a chair and watched me clean the lint trap housing and vent path step by step. After I showed her how the lint builds up inside the duct, she said, "So I should be pulling this apart every 6 months, not just cleaning the screen." She even took a photo of the clogged duct with her phone. Has anyone else had a customer actually care enough to learn the fix instead of just paying and forgetting it?

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