Any large appliance is prone to collecting dust underneath on components
that get hot, effectively insulating and making hotter those parts. It is a
wise practice once or twice a year to clean them out underneath,
particularly the clothes dryer. Someone said (insurance adjuster or fireman,
not sure which) that a fair percentage of appliance caused fires happen due
to this.

        Kurt Stevens

> ----------
> From:         Mike Keitz[SMTP:mkeitz@JUNO.COM]
> Sent:         Wednesday, September 15, 1999 7:03 PM
> To:   PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject:      Re: [OT] Cloths Driers was Muscle contraction.  was: cats!
> -Repl
>
> On Thu, 16 Sep 1999 08:10:20 +1200 Lance Allen <l.allen@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
> writes:
>
> > On a consumer advice program last night on TV here there was a BIG
> > serious warning about clothes driers burning houses down!!!
> > Turns out they are responsible for hundreds of house fires in New
> > Zealand alone. All makes and models. The problem doesn't appear to
> > be
> > motors or electrical fires rather that the clothes get so hot that
> > they easily burst into flames under certain circumstances.
>
> I just obtained a surplus clothes drier and installed it at my house.  As
> with everything else, I had a good look inside before using it.  I can
> see several things that could go wrong and cause a fire.  If I find
> another drier and a suitably long length of cable I'll have to go out in
> the yard and try some of them out.
>
> One thing that seemed odd is the high-limit thermostat is self-resetting.
>  If the normal thermostat fails, the heater might start to cycle on the
> high limit thermostat.  A user may not notice that anything is wrong, but
> the clothes would get a lot hotter than they are supposed to.  Perhaps
> this is what happened to the driers in NZ that are causing fires.  If
> this condition persists long enough for the high-limit thermostat to fail
> too, things will get extremely hot.  They should have used a thermostat
> which must be manually reset.  If the high-limit thermostat on anything
> trips, there is almost certainly something wrong.
>
> In this drier, air flows through the heater first, then into the rotating
> drum, then out another opening in the drum to the lint filter, finally to
> the fan and to the outlet.  The normal thermostat measures the
> temperature of the air as it leaves the fan, i.e. just before it leaves
> the drier.  This air may be much colder than the air inside if there is a
> leak.  A prime cause of such a leak would be failing to replace the lint
> filter.  Unlike most that I've seen, the fitler on this one slides into a
> slot on the top of the machine rather than being inside the drum.  If it
> is left out the fan will pull most of its air in through the filter
> holder rather than from the drum.  Compounding this problem, the high
> limit thermostat is at the bottom (inlet) end of the heater.  If there is
> any airflow at all it will probably not trip, and extermely hot air from
> the top of the heater will continue to go into the drum.  Under such
> conditions the drying performance would be very poor but once the clothes
> are dry, they could get very hot.
>
> So overall the design of this unit doesn't seem very safe.  Once again,
> appliance manufacurers are "saving a few dollars at the cost of
> children's lives."  Fortunately, scary warnings about consumer products
> are great for building TV news ratings.
>
>
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