For a week or two now, my wife says our dryer hasn't been drying as fast as it used to. Also, the auto moisture sensing feature has never worked well. I talked with a few people I knew and went to work. The idea being that the temperature sensor (and humidity sensor) has been caked full of lint and needs to be cleaned off to work properly.
So, I went to work. I popped off the front cover.
Immediately, you can see this thing hasn't been opened up and cleaned in a looong time, probably never has been.
I initially thought the sensors were in the tube heading to the rear of the dryer.
So, I pulled it out and disconnected the vent.
Finding that the elbow piece was full of lint, I went ahead and cleaned it out.
I also went ahead and stuck the shop vac in the vent pipe in the dryer to clean it out. However, I didn't see any sensors once I had it vacuumed out.
So, I moved back to the front and started removing more parts. This is the first vent piece that holds the filter in the dryer. Of course, another piece caked with lint to clean out.
With that vent pice out, I can finally see the sensors on the right side.
I removed both of them. I believe the black one is the humidity sensor, and the white one is the temperature sensor. The black one was fairly clean yet, but the white one had a bit of lint caked around the edges. I cleaned them both up and reinstalled them.
I'm not absolutely sure that this will fix it, but we shall see in the next week or so.