Why Your Dryer TakesTwo Cycles to Dry Now

It crept up on you. A load that used to come out dry now comes out warm and faintly damp, so you run it again. Then running it twice becomes normal. The machine did not get weaker — almost always, the air got slower, and that is a different problem with a much cheaper answer.

Drying is airflow, not heat

It is natural to think a dryer works by getting hot. Heat is only half of it. A dryer works by moving heated air through the clothes, picking up moisture, and carrying that moisture out of the house. The heat loads the air; the airflow removes it.

Choke the airflow and the machine still makes heat perfectly well. It just has nowhere to put the water. Everything gets hot, the moisture goes round and round, and the load stays damp — so you run it again.

This is why a heat problem and an airflow problem feel completely different at the door. No heat gives you a cold, damp load. Poor airflow gives you a hot, damp load, often with the clothes hotter than usual.

The lint screen is only the first filter

Everyone cleans the screen. The screen catches what it can, and the rest goes past it into the duct, where it settles — particularly at the first bend behind the machine, and at the flap on the outside wall.

Lint accumulates from both ends. Inside, it packs into the elbow where the air changes direction. Outside, it collects around the hood flap, which then stops opening fully. Neither is visible from the laundry room, which is why a duct can be most of the way closed while the screen looks spotless.

Three checks you can do yourself

Go outside while it runs. Find the hood on the wall and put your hand near it. You should feel a strong, warm push of air and the flap should be standing open. A flap that barely lifts, or air you can hardly feel, tells you most of what you need to know.

Look at the flap itself. Lint packed around the hinge, a bird’s nest, or a flap painted shut are all common and all visible from the ground.

Look behind the machine. Pull it out gently and look at the duct. A flexible duct crushed flat against the wall, or coiled into extra bends because the machine sits too close, restricts air badly — and it is the single most common thing found back there.

Those three checks cost nothing and rule in or out the usual cause. Clearing a duct run properly is a different matter — it wants the right brush and somebody who will check the whole run rather than the first metre of it.

When it really is the machine

If the airflow outside is strong and the load still will not dry, then the machine is worth looking at. On an electric dryer a partially failed heating element, a tired thermostat, or a moisture sensor reading wrong will all give you long cycles.

Worth knowing: on many dryers the same restricted airflow that causes the long cycles is also what kills the thermal fuse. Trapped heat is exactly what that fuse exists to protect against. Replacing the fuse without clearing the duct gets you a working dryer and the same failure later, which is why the duct is the first thing to rule out and not the last.

Two cycles is the machine telling you the air is not moving. Check the hood flap before you check anything else.