This morning, as usual, I did laundry. Put a heaping basket of the kids’ clothes in the machine, then when they were done I put them into the dryer and put a load of other clothes in to wash.
Dryer buzzed. Went downstairs, opened dryer door. Inside of dryer—drum, back wall, inner surface of door—is entirely covered with dark grey streaks.
We’ve been through this before. One of my sproggen left a red crayon in his pants pocket, and I didn’t catch it before it went through the wash. The washing machine was fine, but the inside of the dryer—not to mention all the clothes in that load—was entirely covered in red streaks.
It took a lot of work, but I eventually managed to get the red off both the clothes and the dryer. And the kids got an earful about checking their pockets to make sure they were empty before putting them in the laundry basket.
In this case the culprit was a black crayon. This time I sent the kids down with a bottle of spray cleaner to scrub the dryer for ten or fifteen minutes, just to give them an idea of how hard it is to get that crap off. Now we’re using the technique of spraying rags with WD-40 and running them through a dryer cycle; that worked fairly well the last time. (After that you have to run some clean, dry rags through the dryer cycle to clear off the WD-40 before you dry any more clothes.)
Before I had kids I never had any reason to know how to clean crayon streaks out of a dryer. Having a family sure is educational.
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