TIFU by trying to repair my tumble dryer

We had a fuse pop yesterday. Didn’t think much of it, it does happen from time to time. Went and reset it, went back to my life, but a bit later I noticed that the dryer wasn’t working. Nothing but beep beep beep when I press the start button.Two possible causes – one, the door sensor is not registering that it was closed (since it does the same beep beep thing whether door is open or closed). Two the power cut was caused by an overload of some kind, and google suggested there should be a reset switch in the back somewhere.

Well first it had those stupid bloody six pointed star shaped screws, for which I have no screwdriver. Went to the hardware store, came back later. Started taking panels off looking for the reset switch. Swiftly found that I didn’t have room to work in the place where it was sitting, so I had to carry it outside. Weather wasn’t looking that great, but fortunately just cloud no rain.

Anyway, carry on taking off panels and trying to detach things without breaking them. Mostly successful at that. Find an extraordinary amount of dust in there, some of it congealed to the plastic by miscellaneous grossness. Probably mould, maybe oil from a motor or something. Vaccuumed it out as much as I could.

No luck finding a reset switch. Found what looked like a fuse, detached some wire clips (remembering to unplug it first), put them back in later (forgot to unplug it, mild zap, FML). Couldn’t get the front off, which meant that I couldn’t get at the door sensor. Test runs kept failing. Eventually after the second (less mild) shock, I gave up. Put everything back together as best as I could, nine screws left over, FML again.

And then… two hours or so after I started… suddenly occurs to me that while I have tried turning the power off, pressing two buttons at once in a few combinations, and some other random things, I haven’t yet tried holding down the start button for 10+ seconds. So I do that, and the fucking thing works now.

TL;DR: Two hours of taking it apart and putting together my tumble dryer, could have solved it in ten seconds.