So if your dryer has ran an entire cycle and you've opened the door to find wet clothes, this may be your solution to repair.
It could be a few things but more than likely it's either the thermostat, hi-limit cutoff fuse or the element, all of which are contained or either located on the heating element housing inside the lower portion of the dryer. The thermostats and hi-limit cutoffs are made cheaply and are notorious for going out when you are depending on your dryer the most.
Quite often they'll go out during the winter months I've noticed. I think this has to do with cold air entering the dryer housing, either from the ambient temperature of the room wherein it sits or by coming up inside the dryer's duct work from underneath a cold house. Either way, the space around the element housing, including the thermostat and hi-limit cutoff switch become very cold...then someone comes along and gets them really hot, really quickly by turning the clothes dryer on. These components and sensors are made too cheaply to handle these stark, very significant changes in temperatures. As a result, they malfunction or either become defective and quit working all together.
Disassembling Samsung dryer model DV48H7400EW and gaining access.
Once you've removed the face of the dryer so that you can gain access to the heating element, the next step is to remove the duct plate off the rear of the dryer. Remove the one screw, pull the duct plate and 4" pipe all the way out of the dryer. It pulls straight out.
You'll be removing the element housing through this opening. Not enough space to remove it through the front unless you remove the lint filter housing cover, which I elect not to because I'd rather not disturb the fragile foam seal strip associated with that cover. They'll lose their integrity and fall apart. It's just easier to remove the duct plate so that you don't have to worry about trying to figure out how you'd reseal that cover.
Take a peek inside this opening and look for the heating element housing. You'll notice a wiring harness feeding the heating element housing. Trace those two wires down- one attaches at the front of the housing and the other at the rear of the housing: one is attached to one of the spade terminals of the heating coil itself, the other is attached to the hi-limit cutoff switch at the rear.
It doesn't matter which terminal is used when you reconnect these two wires later. As long as you reconnect to one of the heating coil terminals and either one of the hi-limit cutoff switch terminals. The hi-limit cutoff is simply just a single pole switch essentially, just breaking a set of internal contacts inside, so you can't accidentally place a wire on the wrong terminal.
WEAR GLOVES--very sharp edges everywhere inside -- very gently remove those wires, may take a little rocking side to side as you pull.
Return to front of dryer and remove the one screw securing the housing onto it's base. Pull towards you to dislodge from rear flange and then pull the housing out of the rear opening.
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Remove a few screws and you can take the housing apart and remove the heating element.
There wasn't anything wrong with my coil this time, I got a great ohm reading but chose to replace anyway because I had the dryer opened. Plus, notice there is a crack in the plate. So i'll just replace.
I took an Ohm reading across both thermostats when the new one arrived just to compare the two. The new one rendered 0 which is superb but the old one gave me a reading of 2.7 Ohms, which is quite a bit of resistance internally for this type switch. Two days ago I couldn't get a reading at all through the old one, there were obviously open contacts inside, so it's definitely defective. My culprit indeed!!
When you're installing your new heating element if you purchased one, be very careful pulling a coil or two apart so that you can arrange your coil leads to get them through the side of the housing. Just don't want to put any sharp bends of significance into them.
Run one terminal through one square cutout in housing and one through the other square. Then slide the terminals into your rectangular insulating ceramic. Make sure you have the tenons of the ceramic facing the housing. Don't do as I accidentally had done, had terminals in place and barbs bent only to discover I had it on backwards.
Mount sensors and reinstall jumper wires.
When installing heating element housing back in place, make sure that the rear portion of the housing slides inside the slip flange. See detail below. The flange is oversized and therefore the parts should mate with ease.
Reconnect two hot wires. Then replace duct pipe and duct plate. The pipe should very easily slide over it's flange. A little different than the element housing mating. The element housing slides inside it's flange whereas the duct pipe slides over.
You're all done.
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