Our dryer crapped out a few months ago. It wasn’t heating up, so I ordered a new heating element. It came with all new sensors, so I installed those too. One of the wire connectors was a bit loose, but I figured it would be fine.
Today, it stopped again, so I took off the back panel and sure enough, the wire was off. Plugged it back in, but no luck.
It’s probably the thermal fuse, but I’m considering paying the $95 to have my home warranty send someone out to just fix it.
I’m only in the hole $25 so far, so maybe I’ll replace everything again and see.
My suspicion is that there’s something shorting out, though. It’s definitely not a clogged vent, because I’m anal about clearing the trap after every cycle, and the vent pipe to the attic looks squeaky clean inside (and the vent tube from the dryer is clean too.
Edit: while typing this I realized that the loose wire probably caused the short, so I’ll try to replace that sensor before calling someone. Thanks for being my rubber duckie.
Update: Problem solved. The loose wire was to the high temperature cut-off that sits in the coil housing. This caused the coil to get too hot and pop.
For what it’s worth I’ve had two types of dryer failures that were repairable. The most common one was “no power” to turn the drum which ended up always being a fried capacitor. The other was no fan, which was due to a worn belt no longer turning from the main drive shaft. Haven’t had no heat issues though but you might be lucky and have fixed one of two problems, so one down and just one more to go!