Clean your Dryer Vents. Do it Now.

[Old Ironsights]

I was down in the crawlspace of the new rental here, squirreling away the back-stock of ammo & freeze dried food buckets, and my Firefighter Spidey Sense started tingling.

So I went and disassembled the dryer vent tube.

From roughly 12 feet of dryer vent, I filled a 2 gallon freezer bag to PACKED capacity with dryer lint. This is from a NEW dryer with the vent tube installed within the last 2 years.

This house was one long day of High Heat Laundry drying from burning to the ground.

Go check your Dryer vent tubes. I mean it. And if they are embedded in walls/floors, get someone there to brush it out.

Dryer Lint Fires are bad news...

[Les Staley]

Ditto, and a big AMEN to that!! We lost our home in Michigan to a fire from that VERY thing in 1985... No one hurt and even saved some of my guns, but lost everything else.. A cleansing experience, indeed..gives you a realigned sense of the important things..Les

[Rusty]

I confronted our builder about our dryer vent when it was under construction. They put the vent 22' straight up thru the roof instead of going 18' sideways thru a side wall.
I have cleaned ours out several times, I even went and bought a brush to do it with.

[firefuzz]

Excellent reminder. Don't forget about having chimneys and flues cleaned before heating season too.

Rob

[Dusty Texian]

Thanks for the good advice!,,,DT

[Sixgun]

OI,
Yes.....I put up a post once a year with pictures to show the stuff that collects....its especially important if you have animals.----------6

[1894]

Good reminder thanks !

I keep a small zip-lock bag of dryer link in my hunting pack for tinder because it is so easy to ignite .

[Blaine]

I won't run the dryer if I'm not at home, and paying attention.

[williamranks]

Energy Star has a lot to do with it.
To save power they put in a smaller heater and, to keep the heat in the tub longer, a smaller fan. The old ones would blow your hat off.
In my cousins house the electric dryer was on the second floor and the vent ran 20 odd feet between the floors. Her old dryer took hours to dry anything so I took it apart cleaned the duct until I could see all the way with a flashlight and tested the heater good and it still took hours. I finally shortened the duct to vent out the nearest outside wall, about 4 feet, and it worked fine.
Had a gas dryer in an apartment I sublet. It was 2 feet away from the outside vent and took forever to dry. Whoever installed it used a full 8 foot length of metal flex duct and the duct had two turns and one U turn in it hanging down behind the dryer. Shortened the duct to a straight shot to the vent and it worked fine.
On both of them the heater was cycling on and off on it's temp setting because of not enough air flow through the duct.
Took me a week to figure out the cause on the first one. The second one was easy.

[AJMD429]

I don't use the 'flexible hose' stuff - We have a hole in the wall with a chunk of 4" PVC pipe straight through the wall. Between it and the dryer I install 4" PVC since it is slick on the inside, and there is a slip-on (vs. cemented) joint at the wall, so new dryers can be accommodated every few years. Outside I made a 1/4" hardware-cloth 'cage' to cover the end to keep birds from nesting in it. It can be 'hosed' with the garden hose from ground level (dryer on the second floor) when it gets cloggy.

Of course I am 'fire-paranoid' - ALL of our household wiring is 10 gauge when 12 would be ok, and ALL of it is in metal conduit, under the drywall, and we heat with a wood furnace that is in its own 5'x8' room made of concrete block with metal ceiling, and there is a 3/4" water line in that room with a thermal let-off at 200 degrees. Next step is replacing the stupid '40-year shingle' roof with a REAL roof - of metal (the only real roof materials in my book are metal, or concrete).

[williamranks]

I don't use the 'flexible hose' stuff - We have a hole in the wall with a chunk of 4" PVC pipe straight through the wall. Between it and the dryer I install 4" PVC since it is slick on the inside, and there is a slip-on (vs. cemented) joint at the wall, so new dryers can be accommodated every few years. Outside I made a 1/4" hardware-cloth 'cage' to cover the end to keep birds from nesting in it. It can be 'hosed' with the garden hose from ground level (dryer on the second floor) when it gets cloggy.

Of course I am 'fire-paranoid' - ALL of our household wiring is 10 gauge when 12 would be ok, and ALL of it is in metal conduit, under the drywall, and we heat with a wood furnace that is in its own 5'x8' room made of concrete block with metal ceiling, and there is a 3/4" water line in that room with a thermal let-off at 200 degrees. Next step is replacing the stupid '40-year shingle' roof with a REAL roof - of metal (the only real roof materials in my book are metal, or concrete).

I gotta admire some one who can think. Nice job.
In case I wasn't clear the number of direction changes, especially with flex duct, have more to do with air flow than the length.

[3leggedturtle]

No one I know has lint, cuz I use it for my bugout bags and starting fires. Even a spark from a dead bic will ignite it so good advice, to keep in mind.

[wm]

Used to see this sort of fire about once a month when I was a appliance repairman. usually it just made a mess of the dryer and or vent and was stopped before any serious damage was done but not always. The worst part is they can smolder during the day before really getting going while you sleep. My nephew who owns the appliance business now makes a nice side income doing maintaince of a local coin op laundromat. He pulls trash bags full of lint out of those machines & vents every other week so imagine what a large family can accumulate in a year.

My wife melts old candles and then uses a combination of the wax and dryer lint in a cardboard egg container to make handy fire starters. Wax makes then fairly water resistant and burn pretty steadily over a long period so they are great for starting fires with damp wood. Just be careful which scented candles you mix together. Sometimes you can get a pretty funky combo of scents.

Occasionally we get backed up on them and sell/trade them to guys that I know that set up at local flea markets. Best deal ever was a newish Marine KaBar for 20 sheets of 24 lint/wax fire starters (he sells them $5 a piece or 3 for $10). Not bad for something most folks would put out in the trash. Campers and hikers use them but so do people with wood burners and even guys who grill with charcoal. Even local "Preppers" have discovered their usefulness and seem to like to have them in their bug out kits.

[jcw]

Great advise. Dryer vents always cleaned in my pre winter chores.

[jazman]

Geez. I remember the posting Six did on this a while (year?) back. There was enough lint in there for a score of Santa beards...or two beards for TTT!

[claybob86]

Checked mine, it was in pretty good shape, but cleaned it anyway. Thanks for the reminder!

[jeepnik]

Like OI, I've seen the results of a plugged dryer vent. But, I don't clean mine. Nope, never gonna do it. I just replace it every year. Mine's the flexible type, and pretty short. So, it's easy to move the dryer, and put on a new one.