The drum turns, the timer counts, the clothes come out cold and damp. "Runs but no heat" is the most common dryer complaint in our Portland service logs, and the suspect list is mercifully short — but it splits immediately by fuel, so start there: does your dryer plug into a huge 240V outlet (electric) or a normal outlet plus a gas line?
Electric dryers: element, fuse, thermostat
The heating element — a coil of wire that glows like a giant toaster — expands and contracts every cycle until one day it snaps. Everything else keeps working; the air just never warms. A meter reads a healthy element at roughly 8–12 ohms; a broken one reads open, and sometimes you can see the snapped coil (that's exactly the repair in this article's photo — one of ours). Next in line: the thermal fuse, a one-time safety that blows permanently when exhaust air overheats, and the high-limit thermostat, its resettable cousin. All three are affordable, van-stocked parts.
Gas dryers: watch the igniter
Start a cycle and watch through the burner access at the bottom front. Igniter glows bright orange, but no flame ever appears: the gas valve solenoid coils have retired — a famous, inexpensive gas-dryer repair. No glow at all: the igniter itself, or the same thermal-fuse safety chain as electric models. Plenty of Portland's older close-in homes run gas dryers on NW Natural lines, and these two failures cover the overwhelming majority of their no-heat calls.
The part behind the part: your vent
Here's the pattern that separates a repair from a subscription: thermal fuses and overheat trips don't happen for no reason. They happen because a lint-restricted vent turned the exhaust into a sauna. Our damp climate makes lint sticky — it plasters onto duct walls instead of blowing free — and the long vent runs in two-story homes and basement laundries give it real estate. Replace the fuse without measuring the airflow and you'll meet the same fuse again in a month. Every no-heat visit we run ends with an airflow reading at the vent exit, because that number is the difference between fixed and postponed.
What you can check before calling
Electric: confirm the double breaker isn't half-tripped (flip fully off, then on) — one dead leg spins the drum with zero heat and imitates every failure above. Gas: confirm the gas valve behind the dryer is open. Both: clean the lint screen and make sure the flexible transition hose behind the machine isn't crushed flat against the wall. If those pass, it's meter territory — fixed quote after diagnosis, most no-heat repairs done the same visit.
