Introduction
Clothes dryers are major appliances in any home. They help to dry your clothes quickly and are a major investment whenever it’s time for a replacement. If your dryer gets broken, you can get it fixed by professionals by searching for “dryer repair near me”. If your dryer still works fine, check out these amazing dryer hacks:
The Hacks
- Clean the lint trap after every use – You may think that you already clean your lint trap once every few months and that’s enough. The lint trap doesn’t even get too dirty after one wash. However, cleaning your lint trap after every use has many benefits.
The dust that gets trapped in the lint trap is extremely dry. It’s so dry that campers, hunters, and hikers collect it in a jar to use as with a fire-starting flint. Leaving any amount of lint trapped in the clothes dryer is a major fire hazard. All it needs is a single spark to burn down the dryer and also your home.
Moreover, when dust accumulates in the lint trap it obstructs airflow. Even a thin film of dust is enough to impact airflow. That makes your dryer become less efficient. This increases drying time and makes your dryer use more energy.
- Reduce ironing – Ironing is a hassle when you have to iron all the clothes for every family member. You can take advantage of various settings and cycles on your dryer to reduce ironing time. If you have a steam dryer, it can directly inject steam inside the dryer drum to prevent wrinkles on your clothes. This allows you to do away with ironing for many clothes and cuts down on ironing time for the rest.
No need to worry if you have a regular dryer. Regular dryers have a setting called Permanent Press Cycle. You may find it labeled as Perm Press on one of the buttons. This setting limits the spinning speed of the drum to a minimum in order to reduce wrinkles. Modern dryers also have inbuilt features where they continue to rotate the drum slowly for a while even after the cycle is completed. This is done to reduce wrinkles.
- Get a drum rack – If you have bought a dryer within the past five years, it may have a lot of accessory support. While some of these accessories are a cheap attempt at a cash grab, others are very useful. One such accessory is the drum rack. If your dryer supports it, you can slide the drum rack inside your dryer to stabilize bulky fabrics. The rack also allows you to block delicate clothing and dry it faster. You may consider buying one if your dryer is compatible.
- Sanitize cycle – While all dryers don’t have this feature, those that do offer tangible time saving to the owners. If your dryer has a sanitizer cycle you should definitely use it. Sanitizing cycles increase the heat high enough to kill lice, bacteria, bed bugs, and other annoying critters.
When there’s a global pandemic this setting is really useful and keeps you from steam spraying your clothes after every drying cycle. Even when things are normal, killing tiny bed bugs and other annoying insects is a great feature.
- Freshen up your clothes – You may have a favorite shirt or an important item of clothing you need for an appointment. However, if it’s sitting under a large pile of clothes for a long time it may stink. When time is short you can’t throw it in the washing machine and wait for long drying cycles. Instead, you can use a smart feature of your dryer to freshen up your clothes in no time.
If you have a steam dryer, use the steam refreshing cycle to dry that item of clothing. It doesn’t just get rid of the stink but also gets rid of wrinkles. For standard dryers, you need to provide your own steam. Don’t worry, it’s very simple. You just need to dampen a clean piece of cloth and throw it in the dryer along with the shirt or pair of denim that needs to smell and look good. The dryer heat turns the water inside the cloth into steam and gets rid of the stink.
- Re-fluff your comforter – After a long period of use, your comforter may seem lifeless, flattened, and squashed beyond recognition. The fill material inside your comforter gets compressed over time. However, there are numerous ways to fix this.
One of the easiest yet time-consuming ways is to lay the comforter flat directly under the sun for a few hours. However, this option takes a lot of time and isn’t viable during bad weather. Instead, you can put your comforter inside the dryer along with a few tennis balls. Set the temperature to low heat or no heat and the tennis balls would bounce around to re-fluff the comforter.
- Set the alarm – Newer dryers have sensors at the exhaust vent to monitor various conditions. These sensors can easily detect clogging in the vent and show you an error message or even sound an alarm to clean up the vent before using. You may not have heard or come across this feature in your new dryer if it’s disabled or the alarm function is turned off.
Look up the manufacturer’s manual to turn on this feature. It’s a life-saving feature since a clogged vent makes the dryer overwork and heats up the internal components. This increases the risk of fire with all the trapped debris and dust in the exhaust vent. For gas dryers, it’s even more deadly since the lethal carbon monoxide can’t escape the dryer and floods your room as a silent killer.
Conclusion
As you can see a dryer can help you do a lot more than just dry clothes. It can also save you a lot of money when used wisely. If your dryer stops functioning properly you can search for “dryer repair near me” and hire a reputed professional near you to fix it.