The Monster Hiding in the Dryer

You may remember the issues I had in the apartment with laundry, especially the dryer.  I had high hopes that the washer and dryer in the house would be better.  And they are...sort of.  I have a fantastic laundry room.  Infinitely better than the unfinished basement laundry I had in St Louis.  But the washer holds TINY amounts of laundry.  Seriously tiny.  And the dryer, while still better than one at the apartment, is still not like I'm used to with my old (really old...like 12+ years) American dryer.  But tonight I figured out that some of the dryer issues may indeed be my fault. 

My very decent landlord provided English translated manuals for our German washer and dryer.  I did read a lot of them (since all the buttons and dials are in German), but clearly I didn't read them completely.  Tonight I was cleaning the heat exchange unit (don't ask...just a weird maintenance thing with this dryer), and something caught my eye in the door.  It looked like something was wrong inside the actual door panel.  As if something had fallen out of place inside the door.  I tried to figure out how to get into it, when I realized there was an oh so handy latch on the top.  As if one was supposed to access the door panel.  BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE THE LINT FILTER IS.  Now I'm not one of those people who only cleans the lint filter on occasion.  I clean it every time.  I had noticed how little lint was collecting on what I believed to be the lint filter.  But this dryer is a completely different animal than any I've seen (besides the cleaning the heat exchanger thing, I have to dump a collection bin of water out of it after every load), so I figured that must just be another quirk.  In fact, no.  So in the entire time I've lived in this house and done laundry (over a month)...I have NEVER properly cleaned the lint filter.  You can imagine what I found inside.  Or maybe you can't.  So I took pictures.

 

The machines

 

The strange thing that fills with water...

 

and needs to be removed and dumped after every load. (See...I read most of the manual!)

 

 

This is what I thought was the lint filter.  It's a filter.  And it does get small amounts of lint on it.

 

 

See how it looks strange inside the holes?

Because of this lint monster!

 

Is that crazy or what?!?

 

I am now diligently cleaning the lint filter, which gets a completely normal amount of lint on it after every load.  But it still takes forever to dry.  :)