So that’s where socks go to hide

/ October 7, 2015

The strange sound started in our LG dryer more than a week ago. It whined. It whirred. It sounded, well, broken.

After shutting it off — oh, I am that smart, at least — I poked around the back of the stack, and noticed that the metal part that attached the exhaust hose to the dryer had worked its way loose. Oh, my. Part of it had sheared off from the machine. A trip to Lowe’s, though, brought back the part we needed, and my dear wife Karen and I worked well together in the hard-to-reach laundry spot to install the new metal doohickey and reattach the hoses.

We turned it on. Whir. The air was going out to where it needed to free itself, but the bad sound remained.

I broke down and called the company that had fixed the matching washer a year or so ago.

And the nice man showed up at our house, repair tools in his satchel.

Working on the LG.

Working on the LG.

We looked. He listened. His verdict: Something was caught inside.

Yes, down in there..

Yes, down in there..

He took out his longest set of pliers and started fishing. Out came one gnarled sock. He peered back in the hole and saw more. He said we must have run the dryer without the filter in its place. No way would we do that, I answered.

The second sock was more stubborn in its hold of the motor. He had to take the dryer apart.

Yes, that white mass as stuck inside the dryer.

Yes, that white mass as stuck inside the dryer.

I went back into the living room to allow him working space.

He called me in to hear the quiet sound.

And he showed me the mass he pulled out of that hole.

So that’s where our lost socks hang out. How they got in there was beyond me.

The bill for the fix: $140. Better than a burned-out motor, I surmised. The repair man agreed.

And then my dear wife returned home from work. She loved her quiet dryer. I wondered again how those socks got past the filter and down that exhaust chute. Well, she said, there was just that one time she ran the machine, only a couple minutes before discovering that …

What’s the latest repair you’ve had to call in the posse to complete? How often do you lose socks after a wash day? What’s the most you’ve had to spend on a household appliance repair, and how long did the fix last?

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73 thoughts on “So that’s where socks go to hide”

  4. The lost sock mystery has been solved. Now if you could tell me where all the pens and pencils disappear to in our house, I would really appreciate that!!!!! And forks? Why do the forks in our house disappear. And the lids to all our Starbucks coffee cups – where do they go? Are they at your house per chance?

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  6. Glad you called the repair guy Mark! Here’s my solution to the missing sock dilemma: buy 20 pair of the exact same socks, they’ll always match, or do like my daughter and her peers who mismatch socks on purpose and think it’s cool! ❤
    Diana xo

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  8. Mark, we’ve had to get our dryer fixed a few times. One time we had to replace it even. I never considered socks caught into the dryer. Of course! That’s where they go. It’s such a pain when the washer or dryer go. They’re so essential!

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  12. A doohickey is such a useful thingy magigy is it not? Our last callout for a repair man was for the oven. The socks were not to blame for it’s failure to work. I think the odd ones are plotting some mischief as I write. I can never track them down.

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  13. I learned a lot from this post, Mark. Michael recently fixed our running toilet and I fixed our kitchen faucet, despite no plumbing training or experience. I guess we like to avoid calling in the posse, whenever possible. My regards to Karen and all the socks.

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  15. We lose socks every wash day. But over time I’ve discovered that a once a month under-the-bed-check by the males does the trick, so I can’t blame it all on the laundromat

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  18. Ah, one of the benefits of living in a rental. It’s funny because I just read a post about laundry that was called something like ‘Another Mystery Solved’ and I thought for sure it would be about where those lost socks go, but now here I am reading yours. Wow! Could that be the great mystery of our time solved? They are all getting sucked into the filter?

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  19. I was told by an appliance salesman recently that most items are designed to last only about 7 years. Makes sense to me. We’ve replaced frig, laundry and dishwasher twice in just under 20 years. Meanwhile, we have an upright freezer going on 40 years old…go figure !! (They don’t make things like they used to ???). Glad you solved the lost sock mystery, Mark. ☺

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  20. Did you find any of my lost socks in there? I’m pretty sure they’re not anywhere in my house, ’cause I’ve looked. I can only assume they’ve gone to visit all their other lost friends. Maybe there’s a secret Lost Sock Party going on somewhere right now. Oh wait …. I see an appliance repair truck down the street. I’ll be right back.

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  21. I’ve had a number of repairmen visit for various appliances and generally got excellent service.The one exception – which really wasn’t the repairman’s fault – was our new furnace. It would go on heat and not come off. We had at least a dozen repair visits and as soon as they were gone, it would happen again. I knew the business owner and I called him up and told him I would have no choice but to have the new furnace removed and replaced by his competition unless the problem could be fixed. He sent over this old guy with wires sticking out of all of his pockets. Ha! As we went down stairs he told me that he didn’t really trust the “new-fangled” meters. As I watched he started the furnace and took all the wires out of his pockets – each had alligator clips on both ends. He attached a jumper wire to each module, one at a time, asking me to turn down the furnace after each additional wire. As we watched the furnace would not shut off, He had about 10 jumper wires inside the electronics when finally the furnace would shut down. He then got a voltage meter and checked to see what voltage the parts were putting out. It turned out that two components were not”talking” because one component was at one end of acceptable voltage and the other component was at the other end and they were not communicating. This was a manufacturing defect. He had replacement parts and he tested a handful of them until, he found two that were close enough taht they worked. That was the end of the problems and we never had another issue with the furnace.

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  22. I still think socks disappear through some kind of worm hole–along with earrings. Or perhaps they turn into wire hangars.
    We had to get a new heater last year. Our oil company (a small business) was great–came out to do repairs one Saturday night when our heater sounded like a train engine invading our house. After this happened a couple of times, we decided to replace our heater. It was probably 30 years old, so we can’t really complain.

    We definitely need a new washer and dryer. Maybe they sell non-sock eaters? 🙂

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  23. Oh our furnace last year. It tried to ruin the entire winter, but it was $$$$ by the time the last fix was done.
    Anyway, yeah, the sock thing is trouble. I actually saw Moo’s sock slide down the filter as I cleaned it. Never had that happen before, won’t clean it while it runs anymore. The Mister took the back off the dryer and cleaned out the chute, so no worries. Stuff like that can not only burn out the motor, but also start a fire.
    I’ve had to replace the heating element in our dryer, and it ran $125, which I was quite pleased about. Nothin like a big family and clothes dryin all over the house!

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  24. Our washer stopped spinning. Load after load of sopping wet clothes would come out so finally Steven watched some youtube videos on washer repair. He tinkered and cursed and thought he had it fixed,but our problem just got worse. We discovered the part we needed for the repair was going to be almost $300. “Might as well go out and buy a new washer for $400” we decided. So that’s what we did…except we spent $600. Fingers crossed the dryer doesn’t poop out on us!

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  27. Sock Monster Exposed. The Sock Monster has stolen from me for decades. One thing I did was switch over to all black socks. Then there were never any more socks without a mate because it no longer mattered. I went to college and attended some classes when the bars were closed. No sir, no Sock Monster outsmarted me ever again.

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