Last Updated on October 4, 2026 by Umar Farooq
The mistake is reading your code on a page about a different brand. Dryer error codes are not a standard, not an industry convention and not even consistent inside a single manufacturer’s own catalogue. E03 is a blocked condensate hose on a Bosch and has no published meaning at all on a Whirlpool. nd means no drain on an LG dryer and does not exist on a Samsung one. Six manufacturers, six private vocabularies, and the only thing they genuinely agree on is airflow.
That is the useful finding rather than a complaint. If every brand’s code set is private, then the first job is identifying whose convention you are reading — and the second is noticing that five of the six point at your ductwork far more often than at their own components.
This page compares what each manufacturer actually publishes, having opened all six. It is deliberately not a merged master list, because a merged list is the thing that produces the mistake in the title.
Dryer error codes do not translate between brands
Here is the same four characters doing different jobs on different badges. None of these are edge cases; they are all on the manufacturers’ current pages.
E1, E2 and E3 have individual code pages on Whirlpool and Maytag’s help site that contain no definition whatsoever — just a power cycle. On a Bosch, E01 and E02 mean the lint filter is blocked and E03 means the condensation drainage hose is kinked. On a Samsung, 2E is a voltage group member and E3 sits in the communication group. Four brands, one character pattern, and two of them decline to say what it means.
PF is a rarer thing: a code where two brands agree on the condition and disagree on the response. Whirlpool and Maytag both define it as a drying cycle “interrupted by a power failure” and tell you to hold START to resume. LG attaches the same cause — “This usually happens after a power outage” — and then prescribes a factory reset. Same event, one brand says carry on, the other says wipe the control.
And L2 is Whirlpool Corporation’s low-line-voltage code, while LG’s equivalent condition is nP (“no current being detected at the heater”), and Samsung’s is a 9C1 in the voltage group. Three brands, one electrical fault, three unrelated character strings. There is no decoder ring. There is only the right page.
Airflow is the one condition all six report
Every brand in this comparison has a way of telling you the exhaust is restricted, and that is the only statement in this article that applies to all six. It is also, by a wide margin, the condition their own documentation blames most often.
Samsung puts the lint screen and the vent system at the top of two separate code groups, describing the cause of both its temperature and its heating families as “a clogged lint screen or vent system trapping heat in the dryer”. Whirlpool and Maytag give it AF and describe the symptom as the vent being “crushed, kinked or has too many turns”. LG gives it a percentage. Bosch’s E12 page says the dryer is “overheating due to restricted airflow”. GE, which publishes no dryer code list at all, devotes a whole support article to long dry times and opens it on the vent.
Three of the six go further and quantify it. LG prints d80, d90 and d95, and its own wording is explicit that the dryer “has detected a 90% or 95% blockage in the duct work”. Samsung’s Vent Blockage test returns C80 (“About 80% of the vent is clogged”) and C90 (“Over 90%”), though only when you start the test by hand. Whirlpool publishes the only test that needs no electronics: run the dryer 5–10 minutes, hold your hand under the outside hood, and if the air moving is “less than a hair dryer on high speed”, the duct needs clearing.
That last one is the most quoted thing in this article for a reason. Everyone owns the reference instrument. The procedure is in how to clean a dryer vent, and the symptom it produces before any code appears is in a dryer taking too long to dry.
How much each manufacturer actually publishes
This is the comparison nobody runs, and it changes what you should expect from a search. The counts below are of codes with a published definition on the manufacturer’s own live pages, not of codes that exist.
| Brand | Published codes | What the documentation is like |
|---|---|---|
| LG | 22, with definitions, across two pages | The most generous in the category. Names the condition, gives percentages for blockage, and publishes a reset procedure. Splits its codes between an alphanumeric list and a separate blinking-light page, so two codes exist only on one of them |
| Samsung | 11 groups covering roughly 60 character strings | Grouped by system rather than alphabetically, which is the right call. Four codes get a two-word label and nothing else. Includes a diagnostic test that returns measurements rather than faults |
| Whirlpool | 4 on the summary page, 35 in the directory beneath it | The gap is the story. Fourteen of the thirty-five individual pages carry no definition at all — only a power cycle |
| Maytag | Identical to Whirlpool, down to the part number | The same document with the brand name swapped. Diverges from Whirlpool only on how long to hold the breaker, on four codes |
| Bosch | About 12 entries | The least reliable page of the six. Titled for a dishwasher, asks about dishwasher codes, defines one code twice with two meanings, and gives two others headlines borrowed from other appliances |
| GE | None for a standalone dryer | Publishes fault codes only for its combo washer-dryers, and plain-English messages rather than codes elsewhere |
Two things fall out of that table. The brands with the fewest codes are not the brands with the simplest dryers — they are the brands that chose prose over characters. And the brand with the best code documentation, LG, is also the one whose retired code page Google still ranks above its live one.
Five brands, five different reset instructions
The universal first move for a dryer code is to cut the power and restore it. What nobody mentions is that the five manufacturers who publish a figure publish five different figures, and the short ones fail silently — a control board that has not discharged re-reads its stored state and hands you the same code back.
Samsung gives three numbers for three situations: 30 seconds at the breaker to confirm a half-tripped 240 V circuit, 60 seconds unpowered for an unresponsive panel, and 2 to 3 minutes for a code already on the display. Whirlpool says one minute, except on nine of its own code pages where it says five. Maytag says five minutes for F4 E4, L2, ERR and PF on pages otherwise identical to Whirlpool’s one-minute versions. Bosch says “at least 5 minutes”. LG says something else entirely: power off, cut power at the plug or breaker, and then while the dryer is still dead, hold START/PAUSE for five seconds before restoring power.
GE declines to play. On its combo machines, several conditions trigger a lock-out that GE enforces against you: “the Combo will initiate a 4 minute lock-out period. The Combo controls won’t respond or change during this time” — and, pointedly, “If you try to bypass the lock-out period by unplugging the appliance, the 4-minute timer will start over again.” One manufacturer has met its customers and designed accordingly.
Take the longest figure that applies to your brand. And remember what a reset is: it clears a stored state, after which the machine re-tests the condition. If the same code returns at the same point in the cycle, the reset worked perfectly and the fault is real.
GE barely publishes any, and that is a decision
GE Appliances is the interesting outlier, because the absence is deliberate rather than careless. Search its support library for dryer error codes and you find two things: a fault-code article for the GE Profile UltraFast Combo washer-dryer, and nothing for standalone dryers.
What GE does instead is write sentences. Its combo units use what GE calls a Consumer Help Indicator, described as “our way to communicate a simple remedy for certain situations without the need to call for service” — and the messages are literal English: “DOOR OPEN”, “Check and Clean Drain Pump Filter”, “Confirm H2O Supply is ON”. Only two actual codes appear anywhere, and GE explains both: 353 “most often means that the lint filter is clogged with fabric softener residue”, and 18 means “the pump filter needs to be cleaned.”
There is one numeral GE documents on a standalone dryer and it is not a fault at all, which makes it the most valuable thing on the brand’s whole support site. On 2019-and-newer models the dryer may need its “personality” set, and until it is, “the dryer may not turn on or tumble and a ‘1’ or ‘2’ appears in the display”. Select 1 for electric, 2 for gas. A dryer that will not tumble, showing a single digit, looks like a dead machine and is a menu.
Four displays that are not faults on any brand
Across all six manufacturers the same four non-faults generate code searches, and none of them is a fault.
The control lock. Samsung calls it CL, LG calls it CL or CHILD LOCK, Whirlpool and Maytag call it Loc, and Bosch shows a key symbol. All four disable the panel; three of the four release on a two- or three-second button hold. Samsung’s own description of its icon is worth having because it is unguessable: it “may look like a baby or a lock with a smiley face.”
The filter reminder. LG’s Check Filter is, in LG’s words, “not an error, it is designed to serve as a reminder to clean the lint filter before each use” — it carries no information about your actual filter and clears when you select a cycle. Whirlpool’s Check Vent light does the opposite: it is a measurement, lights only when low airflow is detected during sensing, and stays lit for the whole cycle.
The anti-wrinkle tumble. An LG drum that keeps turning long after the cycle ended is running Wrinkle Care, which LG documents as rotating “for 10 seconds and then off for 6 minutes” for up to three hours, stopping the moment the door opens. Nothing has failed. Nothing is stuck.
A firmware download. Samsung’s dn is the one display in this whole article where the standard advice is actively wrong. Samsung’s warning: “Do not unplug or shut off power to the dryer while this code is displayed. Doing so may cause the dryer to become inoperable and require service.”
The display is the headline; the stage is the story
Codes are coarse because they describe a failed condition rather than a cause. A control board knows that the exhaust temperature exceeded a limit, or that the moisture bars saw nothing for five loads, or that the voltage on one leg was wrong. It does not know whether that was a duct, a thermostat or a breaker, and it will happily report the same characters for all three.
What narrows it is where the cycle stopped, which the display never tells you. A dryer that heats for ten minutes and then cuts out has a thermal limit being reached — airflow. A dryer that tumbles from the first second and never warms at all has an independent heat circuit that is not switching on, which on a 240 V machine means one of two legs. A dryer that stops within seconds of START has a door, a latch or a lock. Three different repairs, and on several of these brands one code string covers all three.
So write down three things before you touch the breaker: the exact characters, the point in the cycle, and whether the drum was turning. That trio beats any code table, including this one. Where it points for the commonest outcome is in a dryer that is not heating.
When the code is the least important thing in the room
These override the display, every time, on every brand. No exceptions and no troubleshooting first.
- A burning smell during a cycle, or smoke. On a gas dryer Samsung’s own instruction is to clear the building of all occupants and contact emergency services.
- Any scorching, discolouration, melting or heat at the plug, the outlet, the power cord or the terminal block. Switch off at the breaker, not at the plug.
- A breaker that trips again after being reset. It is doing its job correctly. Re-arming it repeatedly is the wrong response every time.
- A measured blockage at the top of the range. LG states plainly that running a dryer with a severely restricted exhaust “may create an unsafe environment”.
- A thermal fuse that has already been replaced once. Whirlpool’s wording is that these are “a one-time device”, so a second failure is reporting the vent, not the fuse.
- Gas smell of any kind, at any time, code or no code.
Six vocabularies, one duct, and a note on who to believe
The conclusion this comparison actually supports is not that one brand documents better than another, though LG plainly does. It is that the code tells you less than the industry’s SEO suggests, and that five of the six manufacturers spend most of their code sets describing things outside their own cabinets — ducts, hoods, breakers, terminal blocks, gas valves and winter air coming back down an open vent.
The one position worth holding firmly: a definition you cannot trace to a manufacturer page is not a definition. The three-digit GE codes, the hyphenated Maytag Bravos codes, the Bosch tables that contradict Bosch, the Samsung sensor quotation that existed on no Samsung page for years — all of them circulate because nobody opens the source. Find your brand’s page, read its characters, clear the duct, and be suspicious of anyone who knows more about your code than the company that built the machine.
FAQ
Are dryer error codes the same across brands?
No. There is no shared standard. The same characters mean different things on different badges, and several codes that carry confident definitions on one brand’s page have no published meaning on another’s. The only exception within a brand family is Whirlpool and Maytag, which publish one identical document under two names.
Which dryer error code is the most common?
Airflow. It is the one condition every manufacturer in this comparison publishes a code for, and the one their own documentation blames most often — AF or F4 E3 on Whirlpool and Maytag, the tC and HC groups on Samsung, d80 to d95 on LG, E12 on Bosch.
How do I reset a dryer to clear an error code?
It depends on the brand, and the figures are not interchangeable. Maytag and Bosch say five minutes at the breaker, Whirlpool says one, Samsung says two to three minutes for a displayed code, and LG wants START/PAUSE held for five seconds while the dryer is unpowered. When in doubt, take the longest figure.
What dryer error code means the vent is blocked?
AF or F4 E3 on Whirlpool and Maytag. d80, d90 or d95 on LG, where the digits are the measured blockage percentage. The temperature and heating groups on Samsung, with C80 and C90 from its vent test. E12 on Bosch. GE publishes no code and writes about it in prose instead.
Why does my dryer show a number instead of a code?
On a 2019-or-newer GE dryer, a 1 or 2 is the “personality” setting rather than a fault — 1 for electric, 2 for gas — and the dryer may refuse to tumble until it is chosen. On LG, d80/d90/d95 digits are a blockage percentage. On Samsung, C80 and C90 are vent test results.
My code is not on any brand’s list. Is that normal?
Yes, more than people expect. Fourteen of Whirlpool’s and Maytag’s own thirty-five code pages publish no definition, Samsung gives four codes a two-word label and stops, and GE publishes no standalone dryer codes at all. Record the characters and the cycle stage rather than accepting a parts-retailer definition.
Does a dryer error code always mean I need a repair?
No. Control lock, filter reminders, power-failure codes, anti-wrinkle tumbling and firmware downloads are all conditions rather than faults, and the airflow codes are maintenance. Across these six brands, the codes that genuinely require service are mostly the ones the manufacturer labels “requires service” in those words.
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Six manufacturers, six private vocabularies, and one duct behind all of them. Identify whose convention you are reading, write down where the cycle stopped, and clear the exhaust before you buy anything — because on five of these six brands, the manufacturer’s own pages blame it first.
Sources opened for this page: Samsung, dryer displays an error code · Whirlpool Product Help, Error Codes in Dryers · LG, Dryer — Error Code List · Bosch, Bosch Dryer Error Codes. All read live on 3 October 2026, along with the Maytag and GE Appliances pages quoted above.
