Appliance Repair
A dryer that tumbles happily but never gets hot is one of the most common appliance calls there is. The good news is that the cause is usually a cheap part rather than a dead machine. The less good news is that on an electric dryer the most common cause is a safety device doing its job, which means something else is wrong upstream of it.
Pull the dryer out and disconnect the exhaust duct. If the duct is packed with lint, or the flap on the outside of the house barely opens, you have probably found the root cause. A restricted vent traps heat in the cabinet, the thermal fuse or high-limit thermostat cuts power to the heat, and the drum keeps turning as if nothing is wrong. Clear it first, or whatever part you replace will fail again.
An electric dryer needs 240 volts, delivered as two 120-volt legs through a double breaker. If one leg trips or fails, the motor, drum and light still run on the remaining 120 volts, but the heating element gets nothing. That is exactly the "runs but never heats" symptom, and it is why the panel is worth checking early. Switch the double breaker fully off, then back on. A half-tripped breaker does not always look tripped.
A thermal fuse is a one-shot safety device: once it blows it never resets. The part is inexpensive, but treat a blown fuse as evidence rather than as the diagnosis. It blew because the cabinet overheated, and the usual reason for that is the vent restriction above.
On an electric dryer, a burned-out element coil produces this symptom directly, and elements do simply fail with age. A cycling thermostat stuck in the open position does the same thing. Both are testable with a multimeter, which is where the job starts needing a tool most households do not own.
A gas dryer with no heat is usually the igniter, the flame sensor, or the gas valve coils. You can often hear the difference: if the igniter glows and then nothing lights, the coils are a prime suspect. Gas work sits much closer to the "call somebody" line than electric work, because you are dealing with a gas valve and live combustion, and there is no upside to guessing.
Unplug the dryer before opening anything. That part is not optional. Clearing the vent and resetting a breaker are both worth doing yourself, and between them they solve a real share of no-heat calls for nothing. Past that, testing an element or a gas valve properly means knowing what reading to expect, not just how to hold the probes. Chicago homeowners can hand that part over to the appliance techs we recommend in Chicago.
Clean the lint screen every load, and have the full vent run cleared periodically, more often if the run is long or turns several corners. Restricted venting is both the leading cause of no-heat failures and a genuine fire risk, so it is worth staying ahead of regardless of how the dryer is behaving.
On an electric dryer the most common causes are one half of the 240-volt double breaker having tripped, a blown thermal fuse, or a burned-out heating element. On a gas dryer it is usually the igniter, the flame sensor, or the gas valve coils. A clogged exhaust vent is what causes several of those parts to fail in the first place.
Yes. A restricted vent traps heat inside the cabinet, which trips the thermal fuse or high-limit thermostat and cuts the heat while the drum keeps turning. Clear the vent first, because replacing the fuse without clearing the vent means it will blow again.
Usually yes. Thermal fuses, thermostats and heating elements are inexpensive parts, so a no-heat fault is one of the more repairable dryer problems. The common guideline is to replace instead when the repair would cost more than about half the price of a comparable new machine and the dryer is near the end of its expected life.