Older GE Dryer

[pulltostart]

If you can see past the bad photography....
They claim it still works, the price can't be beat. It appears to be a DDE8200 (pre-1976), harvest, large-capacity model.
Lawrence

Pardon Our Interruption...

 

[gansky1]

Those poor dryers were slow enough to begin with, but to have a vent like that would only make things worse! I wonder how far that vent goes, out to the mailbox? I'll bet it takes a day and a half to get a load dry in that machine!

 

[mayken4now]

What was the deal with the PREGNANT DOOR?

 

[westytoploader]

One strange thing about those 70's GE dryers is that door...it's plain HUGE! Looks like a meat locker or body storage...

Although the "pregnant door" setup is like the Westinghouse design...the lint gets sucked through the holes in the door and into the filter, so you don't have to pull the filter out to clean it. I find this setup VERY inconvenient...luckily I don't have to deal with it! Although I do remember "scraping lint" from that Montgomery Ward/WCI dryer when I was little!

 

[kenmore1978]

basic info

It's amazing how people still leave out basic info like is it GAS or ELECTRIC?!

 

[kenmore1978]

unless

unless they are so dumb, they assume it's electric because it's a General ELECTRIC machine

 

[gansky1]

The huge door was a great feature, but I found CR to be right in their testing - you couldn't put an average laundry basket on the floor in front of the machine and open the door.

I was told the problem was that GE used the same fan in these machine that they used in their smaller dryers and there wasn't enough air flow for speed. The machine I had also had problems with lint collecting all around the door opening and around the round door air vent (the pregnant belly with the holes). Despite all this, they still made this dryer for a number of years, Hotpoint, JCPenny and other brands as well.

The first gas models of this style had a huge burner in them, like 24,000 BTU which probably helped the speed some but the burner was reduced to 18,000 in later models.

 

[tomturbomatic]

I'm not too dissatisfied with mine which I use indoors during the winter. It is true that big linty loads will leave lint around the door opening, but that happens with the regular sized dryer, too. I guess that our GE dryer at home had such a short vent that the moderate sized loads we dried did not produce that effect. Mine is the Americana with the fluorescent light, extra care and signal and I guess that everything I dry in it has been spun to the max, so that probably helps also. It does not roll up sheets like regular Whirlpool dryers tend to do.

 

[Cybrvanr]

That's very similar to my mom's dryer, which is about a vintage 1973. The "pregnant door" on hers is not perfectly round, but sort of a "flat tire" shape, with the bottom flat. The lint screen is in the bottom of the door. One of the curious things about this dryer is the interesting sound you get when the unit is bumped. It sort of sounds like a thousand springs bouncing around at one time.

 

[tomturbomatic]

Steven, your mom's is based on the more traditional GE dryer style. To make that 27" design Large Capacity, the heating elements were moved from behind the drum and put underneath the drum in a "can." The rear of the drum was pushed back to make it deeper with the heated air still coming in through the holes in the back of the drum. The sound of springs is made by the open coil heating elements rattling in their ceramic insulators and perhaps amplified by the heater shroud.

 

[toggleswitch]

The first gas models of this style had a huge burner in them, like 24,000 BTU which probably helped the speed some but the burner was reduced to 18,000 in later models.

?????? How is 24k huge?

Aren't most dryer burners here 22,000 BTU/hr these days?
(Remember the averge stove-top burner is 12,000 BTU/hr.)

from 18k to 24k is a 25% difference in size

 

[knitwits1975]

My grandparents used to have a dryer like this one, (bought it in 1979) and it worked very well, dried really quickly. But you are right about the 1,000 springs thing. The opening was full round instead of the 3/4 round like the typical GE/Hotpoint.

 

[gansky1]

It might have been 27,000 BTU, but was larger than the standard for sure. A larger burner brings the dryer up to operating temperature faster and even a 25% increase in burner size would still be faster - at least in the initial temp rise phase.