Outside the Box: Your Dryer Vent

The majority of duct work in your house is for the HVAC system.  However, there are other ducts in your house that need to be properly maintained, or they could pose health hazards such as fire or carbon monoxide poisoning.

1) The Lint Screen

Some people have made it a second nature to clean the lint screen in their dryer every time they remove a load of clothing from it; other people never give it a second thought until tufts of white stuff vaguely resembling Santa’s hair start growing around it.  Kudos to you if you are a conscientious lint screen clearer, but cleaning the lint screen is not the same as cleaning a dryer vent. 

2) The Dryer Vent

Although the lint screens in this country labor valiantly, even in the best maintained dryer some lint escapes to live permanently in the dryer vent – that silver tube that runs from your dryer to the outside.  Dryer vents cleaning require, at a minimum, a strong vacuum cleaner with a long reach.   If the dryer vent is long enough, or its use is more at an industrial level than a simple house hold level, you probably should consider including its cleaning in a complete air duct cleaning or consider purchasing a dryer vent air system package.  If your dryer vent has broken, or split apart, then you should do a dryer vent replacement.  Unless the path of your dryer vent is unusually complicated or travels through parts of your house that you can’t reach easily, the repair is a fairly simple and you should be able to do it yourself. 

3)  Ways to Tell if Your Dryer Vent Needs Cleaning

The first way to check on your dryer vent is to go to the place on the outside of your home where the dryer vent releases air.  A build-up of lint around that area means that your vent should be cleaned.  More subtle signs show up in the performance of the dryer.  If your dryer seems to be running hotter than it used, but is drying clothes less effectively, the first thing to check would be your dryer vent.  Another sign might be an unusually high temperature difference between the laundry room and the rest of the house, indicating that more of the hot exhaust from the dryer is reaching the inside of the house than it should.  The staff at Air Duct Cleaning Fountain Valley can answer any questions you might have about your dryer vent, if you are concerned.