Sometimes problems bring good.

A few weeks ago, our gas clothes dryer of 18 years quit heating. I messed with it enough to see that I couldn't fix it easily and our laundry room is quite small and difficult to work in, so we decided to go ahead and get a new set. It couldn't be delivered until the following week, and we had planned a get away to celebrate 52 years of wedded bliss, so our son met the guys and got it installed.
We got home last weekend and of course had dirty clothes from the trip to try out the new stuff. Really cool with honest to goodness bells and whistles, though we tried to get the most simple set we could find (within reason). However before the first load got dry, it stopped and flashed “Check Vent”... I wrestled the washer over so I could look behind the dryer and maybe that flimsy flexible duct that hooked it to the outside vent was kinked. Moved it out a bit and tried again. Over the next couple of days,  3 times I had moved the units around and checked and messed with the vent thinking with the tight room it was that the flexible connector was getting kinked. After making sure that wasn’t the problem, I decided to go in to Dick Van Dyke’s (where we bought it)  and talk with them about the sensitivity of their machine. I took the reading material with me that I had quickly scanned. Before I turned onto the interstate, the thought hit me (I must believe it was that still small voice), to pull over and look at them again. This time my eyes went quickly to the details of checking the vent and rested on, “make sure it is clear to the outside”. Since our washroom is in the center of the house, there is a long run between floors to the vent out back. I remembered that a few years ago, the flapper on the outside had come off and birds were trying to build in there before I got a new one up. I thought I had checked that and put up a new one. (Don’t get ahead of me here.) I had seen some helpers online about clearing ducts (heating ducts) a few weeks ago, and had thought about doing that with the dryer vent before installing the new one. However with the trip, etc. things got too tight to do that. Part of the “helper” was to stick a blower down the vent and put a vacuum on the other end. Well I couldn’t do that. The outside vent is at least 10 feet off the ground since our laundry room is on the second floor. Anyway, I came back home and moved the stuff again and stuck a blower down the vent and all kinds of lint came back into the room and it was obvious that it was plugged. So I went outside, crawled up on a ladder and stuck a long stick with hooks on it that I had put together to string outdoor Christmas lights in and pulled out all kinds of nesting material and lint. Then went back in and hit it with the blower. After going back and forth between blowing and pulling, I got it all cleaned out and you could see daylight from the washroom by looking down the vent. After cleaning up the mess and showering, I ran another load of wash and this time no “Check Vent” warning. I do believe that problem is solved. So, maybe the old drying going bad (It had no sensor on it)... saved us from burning our house down???? Will never know, but will always think that the failure of the dryer saved our house from burning down. Of course it is possible that the plugged vent caused the dryer to fail, but I would have expected the motor to fail rather than the heater.... Who knows???? Now of course the deck on the back of our house is decorated with little tufts of lint until the weather finishes cleaning it up.