Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Project 365 Day 285: Lint Trap

Replacement lint traps are surprisingly difficult to locate on the Internet. Observe the following facts:

  1. We need a new lint trap (this photo should provide sufficient evidence)
  2. We went to Lowe's, which sells our model of dryer, asked an employee about replacement filters, and got a card from him pointing us to the lowes.partsquik.com website, which he told us would provide access to "a warehouse full of replacement parts"
  3. I located both our dryer model number as well as the specific lint trap part number
  4. Inputting either the dryer model number or lint trap part number into the website's search form yielded no matches
  5. Inputting the dryer model number or lint trap part number into Google yielded only a couple of links to websites with Chinese characters
  6. Inputting the same numbers into www.whirlpoolpartsonline.com (the "official" Whirlpool parts site) also came up empty
Of the above, fact (5) is the most surprising to me. I have often found that no matter what I'm looking for, if I type it into Google, I will find it. Not this time!

I finally gave up and tried searching for more generic phrases like "Whirlpool dryer lint trap" which eventually led me to what I assume is a replacement part with a different model number on amazon.com. Hopefully the dryer appliance companies are not so evil that they would conspire to create multiple hexagonal lint trap parts that are not interchangeable.

We shall see.

UPDATE: See how this turned out here!

3 comments:

Caryl said...

How did that turn out? We suffer the same fate, ye olde warped lint trap...

Adam said...

CarylRz, sorry for the belated moderation of your comment. The good news is that the replacement lint trap we found online worked fine. If your lint trap is also an odd hexagonal shape for a Whirlpool brand, chances are whatever you find online will work.

Adam said...

Let it be known in all the land that on this Tuesday, April 19, 2011, the blog post above made the first page of Google search results for Whirlpool Dyer Lint Trap.

Does Google send certificates for this kind of thing?