Fixing a Clothes Dryer – Before You Replace the Breaker Box, Learn from Our Mistakes!

My husband and I are idiots. Yes, but it makes sense if you take things in context. Around five years ago, give or take a year, our clothes dryer died. I researched how to fix it online and ended up finding out that an important wire had frayed. Thankfully the dryer didn’t catch on fire! After calculating the cost of repair verses the cost of replacement, it was decided that the best route to go would be to buy a new dryer. Our old dryer was very very old and because they are the number one cause of house fires, it’s best not to keep a really old one around too long.

Our new dryer kept tripping the breaker. Since the old dryer never did this, we assumed (here’s our mistake) that it must be that our breaker box just could not handle the new appliance.

Our house was built in 1963, and most of the stuff in it was still original to the house, such as the breaker box. Life keeps pulling the rug out from under us, so we could not afford to replace the breaker box at that time.

As time went by, the dryer would trip its breaker more often, eventually getting to the point that the dryer wouldn’t dry anything anymore. Well, unless you stood there and clicked the breaker back on every ten minutes. When it got that bad, we still could not afford to have a new breaker box put in because I had been out of work for almost a year.

One morning this fall, my husband left me a note to inform me of the bad news. Our dryer no longer worked at all. The breaker went bad, probably from all the strain of tripping these past years. Because of heavy rain, he came home early from work and we decided to go and look for a replacement breaker to hold us over until we could get the box replaced.

We found out how dumb we are.

The guy at the electrical supply store told us that replacing the breaker, not the box, would have fixed our dryer problems all those years ago! Apparently, the age of the breaker and the draw of a newer appliance caused its downfall. And the tripping had NOTHING to do with the dryer, and NOTHING to do with the box, but everything to do with the breaker.

We swallowed our embarrassment, bought and installed this new breaker, and our dryer is working perfectly. Doesn’t trip at all and it actually dried a load of towels in thirty minutes!

The moral to the story is that we learned never to assume anything about the inner workings of our house ever again. We learned that it is cheaper and less stressful to ask an expert than to put off fixing something we use daily.