VIDEO TRANCRIPTS

If you have known me for any period of time, you probably know that what you see is what you get. This is authentic Heather. And today for today's video, I have a maintenance tip. And you know this tip came from personal experience, which is a little bit embarrassing, so let's just not judge and we're just gonna be real here for a second because I think that it's easier said than done to be a good homeowner, the best of us.

Yours truly is sometimes a terrible homeowner. And so I'm going to learn from my mistakes and then I'm going to share with you my mistakes so that you can learn from my mistakes without having to have your own mistakes, right? I mean, what are friends for, right? Recently we were drying, What were we doing?

I was drying clothes, doing laundry on a Thursday night and I have my clothes on medium cuz otherwise they'll shrink. So I always dry them on medium, they should be done in 40 minutes, no big deal. And three hours have gone by because it's laundry who can keep up? But we had done a load of towels and needed to put them in the dryer. So it's like 11 o'clock on a Thursday night or night owls.

And my husband says, Oh, your clothes aren't dry. And I'm like, Yeah, they should be dry. They've been in there for like three hours and he says they're not dry. I'm like, Oh my god, our dryer has stopped working again. At this point, if you're a homeowner, you probably know what the maintenance tip is going to be, but I didn't get that clue. It took me a really long time.

So stick with me. So you know, hang up the laundry. We realize the dryer is probably broke and we are mad, We are burning mad and blaming Samsung because we have actually, since we've lived in this house since 2009, this is our second washer and dryer set that we're on.

The first one was GE and it broke down all the time and we hated that. So we got a Samsung washer and dryer, which was rated number one by consumer reports and we're like, this is gonna be amazing cuz it's rated number one. It was kind of expensive. And you know when you spend that much money on stuff like you really expect it to, I mean I expect it to fold my laundry.

For me, that is not how it works. So our Samsung, our watcher has been repaired at least once, maybe twice the dryer. I think. I think this would've been the fourth time that it needed repair. A third or fourth time. The heating element has gone out a couple of times.

A few times it was repaired under warranty. We're out of warranty and it's like seven years old now in my head I think, God, it's only seven years old, it should still work. Well, apparently washers and dryers today do not last more than five to seven years. So when I go into Lowe's and I am pissed, I am super mad.

I don't even wanna talk about Samsung and do not recommend GE to me because they're the worst products ever, right? This is my attitude. And she's like, Well I hate to burst your bubble, but like that's normal. They last five to seven years and you should always get the extended manufacturer warranties the advice from that salesperson. Okay? So anyway, we were shopping around, we ended up at Nebraska Furniture Mart.

We ended up having a great salesperson who really knew her stuff. She said the same thing as low salesperson. They both said the same thing, but we, we really like the Nebraska Furniture salesperson a lot. She was able to get a new dryer delivered to us two days after it broke, one day after we made the purchase. So that is, that is perfect.

It's wonderful. Thank God it's not 2020 or 2021 and I'd have to wait a month to have a dryer delivered. Life is good. Plus our dryer, like we have, this is a weird thing about me, we have eight towels in our master bathroom or our primary bathroom. There is room underneath the vanity for eight towels. So that's just all we have. We don't have a linen closet, we just have eight towels.

You know, the other bathrooms have a set number of towels, but the towels we use every day for washing ourselves and drying, there's only eight of them. And they're not new, they're a couple of years old. So they're actually at the end of their life, they're getting a little ratty. And it used to be that we could wash all eight of them in one load and dry it in one load.

But a few months ago, God, maybe even a year ago, Mr. Wright decided this doesn't work anymore. We need to only wash and dry four towels at a time. Like, oh, okay, sometimes I'll try and squeeze in five or six, but they just take forever to get dried. This is another clue to the maintenance tip. So I was really excited for the first load of towels that I was going to do because remember we had washed towels Thursday night and the dryer had broken.

So Friday we rewashed those towels, took them to the laundromat and the laundromat now doesn't even take coins. This is the laundromat in Beaverdale. It doesn't take coins, it only takes a card and it's $2 and 50 cents for 30 minutes. So we spent $5 doing laundry, just just drawing the laundry at the laundromat. And I guess it's been a long time since I've done laundry at a laundromat, but that seems really expensive.

So people are spending a small fortune in quarters, except it's not really quarters cuz they're using their card doing laundry at the laundromat regardless. I was really psyched then to do a load of towels cuz we only had four towels in the load that we took to the laundromat. So we've Got four more to wash on Saturday when the dryer had been delivered.

And I couldn't believe it, they didn't dry very fast. It took a really long time. It was no faster than our old dryer. Now it works, which was good at least. But then it gave me like this D 80 error and I'm like, Oh my god, what am I supposed to do with this? So I read the manual and it says, Oh, check the airflow.

The airflow is not good. And so I'm like, well it should be fine. This machine is brand new. So I read the directions and it said, you know, to clean the lint screen. Yeah, it's, it's brand new, it's clean. And then I went outside and Mr. Wright was not home at the time.

So I'm doing all this myself, my investigative work. And I went outside where the, the dryer event comes out of the house and it, it said to check that, to make sure that it wasn't like plugged up with lint. And that air was flow through while air was flowing through. And I, there was a little bit of lint kind of caught in the netting over that.

And so I cleaned that up, but it wasn't a big deal, I didn't think. And so I could feel the airflow coming through. So I'm like, well it's obviously working, there's air flow so I ignore the air, just put it back on, dry, dry, dry, dry, dry, dry. So now this happens for a couple of days and Mr. Wright and I argue over this cuz I'm like, there's an error. And he says, it's always an error.

I say, Okay, well you know what you're doing. All right. And so then I got to thinking about it and I decided maybe we need to have our ducks cleaned. And this is actually the tip. What a very long story to get to the tip. But you should actually clean your dryer vent duct apparently once a year. That's what's recommended on Dr. Google.

So once a year you should clean out your dryer vent duct. We had our actual ducts cleaned out in the house maybe 10 years ago. And I, I mean, is that a thing that you're supposed to do regularly? Somebody once knocked on the door, they were like a door to door salesman and they're like, Oh, well the National Association of Air Duct Cleaning says that you should have your ducts cleaned every three years.

And I was like, get out of here. That is like saying the National Association of Realtors says you should move every three years. It doesn't make any sense. So I'm like, get off my property. No, I didn't say that, but, so we haven't had our ducks cleaned, which may or may not have been a mistake, but specifically your dryer vent, the duct carrying the lint from your dryer outside the house apparently should be cleaned once a year.

So I said to Mr. Wright, Hey, can you, cause I'm very good at delegating. I said, Can you call somebody tomorrow to get our event cleaned? And he says, I'll, I'll take care of it, don't worry about it. So apparently he had this kit, he had once bought a kit to clean the dryer vent and it has like this little round brush thing.

And then, I don't know, like kind of long glow stick things like, you know those glow stick necklaces that are really flexible that that's what it looks like, but it's white and it's just, they all hook to each other and then you just slide it into your duct and magically it gets cleaned. This is not exactly how it works, but in my head I'm thinking, oh, so that's what that's for.

Okay, he bought this kit but then never did anything with it because apparently it wasn't long enough for our duct. He got the extension, he's watching YouTube videos, he's doing all the things to figure out how to clean this up. And like the little white flexible things that hook onto each other to, to then extend the length of your duct.

Apparently you put like a, it's got an adapter for a drill on it. So you put your drill on it and then they spin and then that spins the brush and that's supposed to get all the lint to then come out of the deck. The D 80 error was indicating that 80% of the airflow in our duct vent was blocked. So after rescuing the brush, we had to take the duct down.

Thank goodness he knew what he was doing because I would be zero help in that regard. He took the vent down, rescued the brush. I got so much lent out of the duct. We're bad homeowners. So do as I say, not as I do and take care of this on an annual basis, which we're gonna try and do.

And like the end of September, beginning of October here in Iowa would be the perfect time for it because it wasn't too hot and not too cold. Yes, it, Scott still said, he was like, I still got sweaty when I was doing that work. So he wanted credit for working hard and he gets that credit because I certainly didn't wanna do that job, but it's a lot better to do it now than I think like in July.

You know, I'd rather do it then. So if you are a homeowner, always a good idea to take care of the things you already own because maybe our dryer wasn't even broke. We were so mad at Samsung. Maybe it was us and not them. Whoops, maybe we didn't even need to get a new dryer. You know, maybe we cost ourselves that extra expense when we didn't need to.

So do, as I say, not as I do, and take care of your stuff so that it lasts longer. And you know, just having things work properly. And I'm sure it's also a fire hazard if your ducks are completely full so that way your home doesn't burn down. How about that? And if you're a buyer and you're thinking about maybe not renting and you're buying your own home, well you should know that these things are on you now.

There's no one to call to take care of your home for you. You gotta be a grown up and you gotta do it yourself. And if you don't do it yourself, you could hire Somebody to do it for you. But if you don't do it yourself and you don't hire somebody to do it for you, it's going to cost you extra money. Like Mr. And Mrs. Wright had to pay extra money for a dryer before we probably actually needed it because we didn't take care of our stuff.

And there you have it, shame on me. But didn't I say that this is a judgment free zone, just getting real Because if it's a lesson that I learned that could hopefully help you, then it's, it's worth it in the end. Right? And now that we cleaned our duct, the dryer does work really well. I'm not sure I'm ready to test eight towels yet,

but you know, we'll see. We'll see how that goes. So that's my tip and a funny story about me. If you'd like to talk appliances or real estate, well reach out. I'd love to talk to you too. Have a great week.



what's my home worth?

The most common question home owners ask is "what is my home worth?" Whether you're just curious, or ready to put a FOR SALE sign in the yard - our automated system can get you a value in seconds.

You might also like