For appliance safety information from a trusted source, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission appliance safety center covers dryer fire prevention and safe operating guidelines for Cedar Rapids homeowners.

What are the signs a dryer needs attention right away?

Some dryer faults can wait a few days. These cannot. Stop using the machine and unplug it, or shut off the gas supply on a gas model, if you notice any of the following.

• A burning or hot lint smell during a cycle. That is lint sitting against something hot.
• The top or front of the cabinet is hot to the touch rather than warm.
• Scraping or grinding that gets worse each load. The drum is rubbing metal on metal.
• No air coming out of the vent hood outside while the dryer runs.
• The breaker trips whenever the dryer is switched on.
• Clothes come out hot in patches or smell scorched.

How do I tell whether the problem is the dryer or the vent?

Run the dryer on a heated cycle for ten minutes, then go outside and put your hand in front of the vent hood. What you feel there tells you which side the fault is on.

What you feel at the vent hood	What it means	What to do next
Strong, warm airflow	Heater and blower are both working	The fault is elsewhere, look at cycle settings or the moisture sensor
Strong airflow, no warmth	Air is moving but the heat circuit is down	Check the double breaker, then the heat circuit parts
Weak or no airflow, dryer feels hot	The vent is restricted or blocked	Clean the vent line before replacing any part
Hood flap never opens	The line is blocked at or near the hood	Clear the line and check for a bird or rodent nest

How do I troubleshoot a dryer that will not heat?

Work through these in order. The first two cost nothing and solve a large share of no-heat calls.

1. Open the breaker panel. The dryer runs on a double breaker. Switch it fully off, then fully on. One half can trip without visibly moving, and when it does the drum still turns but the element gets no power.
2. Pull the lint screen, clean it, and check the vent hood outside opens when the dryer runs.
3. Run a timed cycle and feel the vent hood. Air but no heat points at the heat circuit. Weak air points at the vent.
4. If air is moving and the breaker is fine, the fault is in the heat circuit. Unplug the dryer and test the thermal fuse, thermal cutoff, high limit thermostat, cycling thermostat, and heating element with a meter on ohms.
5. Any part reading 1, OL, or infinity has failed. A good element reads roughly 8 to 12 ohms.

Can a heating element be repaired instead of replaced?

No. A heating element is a long coil of resistance wire, and when it burns through, the circuit is open. There is no way to restore it. Twisting a broken coil back together does hold for a while, but the join becomes a hot spot with higher resistance, and it fails again in weeks. It also creates a real fire risk inside the heater housing.

Elements are replaced as a unit. On most Cedar Rapids dryers the part and labor together run $95 to $180. What matters more is finding out why it failed. Elements usually burn out because restricted airflow kept the heat trapped in the housing, so if the vent is not cleared at the same time, the new element runs just as hot as the one it replaced.

What would cause a gas dryer to stop heating?

A gas dryer tumbles and blows air exactly like an electric one, so a no-heat gas dryer still runs normally. The difference is in what produces the heat.

• Igniter. The most common gas failure. It glows orange but never lights the burner, or it does not glow at all.
• Flame sensor. Fails to detect the flame and shuts the gas off, so you get short bursts of heat then nothing.
• Gas valve coils. The igniter glows, then goes out without the burner lighting.
• Thermal fuse. Same as electric, and usually caused by a restricted vent.
• Gas supply. Check the shutoff valve behind the machine is fully open.

You can narrow it down by listening. Open the door partway through a cycle and listen for the click of the valve and the soft whump of the burner lighting. An igniter that glows with no whump is a valve coil or flame sensor problem. Full detail is on our gas dryer repair page.

What causes a dryer motor to fail?

Dryer motors rarely fail on their own, which is why a dryer is usually worth repairing. When one does go, it is normally a consequence of something else that was left too long.

• Worn drum rollers or a failing rear bearing make the motor work against constant drag until the bearings inside it wear out.
• A restricted vent keeps heat inside the cabinet, and the motor runs hotter than it was designed to for years.
• The centrifugal start switch on the motor fails, so the motor hums but never gets moving.

Can I replace a dryer belt myself?

A belt is one of the more approachable dryer repairs if you are comfortable taking a panel off. Unplug the machine first. Depending on the model you either pop the top up with a putty knife at the front corners, or take the front panel off after disconnecting the door switch harness.

The belt wraps the full drum with the ribbed side facing the drum, then loops around the small motor pulley and through the idler pulley, which springs back to take up the slack. Getting the drum sitting properly on its rollers and the front felt seal seated without folding is the part people find fiddly, not the belt itself.

One thing to know before you start: on many Whirlpool built dryers a broken belt trips a switch that cuts power to the whole machine, so a dryer that seems completely dead can simply need a belt. Fitted, a belt replacement runs $95 to $165 and takes 45 to 60 minutes. See dryer not spinning for the full diagnosis.

Why do people say a modern dryer is not worth repairing after the warranty?

That advice gets repeated about appliances in general, and for dryers it is mostly wrong. It comes from appliances with sealed refrigeration systems or expensive control boards, where one failure can cost more than half the price of a new machine.

A dryer is not built that way. The parts that actually fail are a belt, a fuse, a thermostat, a set of rollers, or an element, and each of those is a small fraction of a replacement. The mechanism has barely changed in decades, so parts stay available for older machines.

Where the advice does hold is on high end units where the control board fails, or when several systems have worn out at once on a machine over ten years old. Our repair or replace guide covers where that line sits.

What if you come out and find nothing wrong with the dryer?

It happens, and it usually means the fault was never inside the machine. The two most common outcomes on a call where the dryer itself tests fine are a restricted vent line and a partly tripped double breaker.

Neither of those is a broken dryer, and neither needs a part. In that situation the useful thing is a clear explanation of what was actually wrong and what to do about it, rather than a part fitted to justify the visit. If the vent is the problem, clearing it is the repair.

Do you work on Samsung and LG dryers?

Yes. They use the same three systems as every other dryer, airflow, heat, and drum rotation, so the diagnosis is identical. Two practical differences are worth knowing.

• Drum bearing wear tends to appear earlier on these models, often in the four to six year range, and it shows up first as a scraping noise.
• The control boards are more sensitive to lint working its way inside, which is a good reason to keep every panel and screw back in place after any repair.

See Samsung dryer repair and GE and LG dryer repair.