The German dryer (a Miele, long-suffering, going on at least its eighteenth year) stopped drying things. My daughter and I gazed into its slightly malodorous innards, removed the still-wet towels, and tried to diagnose. Could she have forgotten to put in that weird triangular water-holder peculiar to the German dryer?
Like German forms, German taxes, German, dare I say, personalities, the German dryer is complicated. Could it, I asked softly, be suffering from the pillow that disgorged its feathers? My fault for washing the thing. And trying to dry it instead of hanging it out in the only occasionally sunny back yard.
But I'd vacuumed the dryer's innards. Or so I thought.
Between the instruction booklet, which we perused, and the faintly-remembered directions of a German friend who'd once fixed the thing, we figured out that you have to take a ruler or a screwdriver or some piece of plastic and pop open a rectangular door at the base of the dryer--a door, I hasten to add, that doesn't look like one, has no handle, and cannot be opened by pressing on one corner. We used a screwdriver. Behind that door was--guess what?--another door, modeled like the kind of wall you'd expect to see from the Soviet side of Berlin back in the day. Once we'd unlatched this second inner portcullis, we found a contraption the size of a toaster--in fact, it looked as though it wanted to be a toaster--filled with damp dust bunnies and feathers.
The manual said one was supposed to empty and clean this thingamajig around every six months. Today was the second time in its very long career, one filled with sand and chewing gum, that it had been cleaned.
We were calculating dryer prices before I cleaned the thing. I didn't expect our poor mistreated dryer to work, ever again, clean or not. I also thought I'd probably broken the vacuum cleaner by forcing it to inhale damp stuff. But German machines are tough enough to endure American incompetence and forge ahead. And this one has.
Yay! I wonder how many more years our poor dryer will put up with us? My German friends have calculated a total life span of approximately twenty-five years. That is one tough machine. A Miele, folks. The kind that beats Maytag any day.
Go Miele! Like you, that one's a honey!
ReplyDeleteIt's a very sweet dryer for putting up with us!
ReplyDeleteLoved this story!
ReplyDeleteMy Mum's GE refrigerator, purchased in 1947, had to be pried from her hands when she and Dad moved from a house to an apartment in 1987. I am sure it would still be running, if she had been allowed to keep it. My new GE refrigerator died about 10 years after purchase, and needed several repair calls while it was still under warranty. My Maytag dishwasher gave up the ghost a few months before the fridge.
While shopping for a new fridge last year, I was advised by several websites that most appliances are expected to last about 7 years, apparently calibrated to the span of most Americans moving house.
Older dishwashers had drying elements; the new ones no longer dry the dishes. I wish I had taken Mum's new dishwasher from 1987 from her apartment after she moved to assisted living. It would probably work well for the next 30 years. Too heavy to carry on stairs and would not likely fit into my car.
Before buying a new DW, I thought of asking the guys in my building to find me an older high-end dishwasher from an, "estate apartment," that they could install for me, but it dd not happen.
Keep your old and well-built Miele dryer running!
Thanks! I'm trying, I'm trying!
ReplyDelete