My fiancee and I are in need of some information here. The vent system from our clothes dryer is very convoluted, going from the the wall behind the dryer, up above the ceiling, then over the kitchen to the outside vent. It appears that it may be clogged with lint. Because of the extreme bends and angles the pipe takes inside the house, we are unable to get in there ourselves to clean the thing out. Who do we call to take care of the problem? Is there anything like a “Roto-Rooter” for dryer vents?
Even with a lint trap in the dryer, some lint gets up into the exhaust vent ductwork and will accumulate over time, especially if the ductwork doesn’t make a reasonably straight line to the outside.
A Roto-rooter for a dryer exhaust vent is also known as a “vacuum cleaner”.
I wouldn’t try a light-duty vacuum like a Dust Devil, I’d go with a more powerful canister vac or an upright that has a hose attachment. If you can get hold of one that reverses, try sucking and blowing, see which one works better.
Usually the lint clog will be where the kink in the ductwork is.
Also, major, MAJOR hint: Make sure you have all the clothes you’ll need for the next week washed and dried before you attempt this, and don’t try it late at night, or on a weekend. That way if you break something important, or the vent falls out of the ceiling and you can’t get it back in again, you won’t be stuck for clothes to wear to work the next few days, and you can get hold of the Dryer Man right away, instead of having to wait until Monday morning.
You could try what my daughter did several years ago. I was drying some clothes, when I heard the dryer making a gurgling sound. To make a long story short, my daughter took a garden hose, and stuck it in the dryer vent on the side of my house.
Oh yeah, she was around four or five years old at the time. She had been playing in the sprinkler outside, and decided that wasn’t interesting enough.
Most vent systems that I have seen are simply pipes inserted into each other. The simplest method may be to disassemble the system at verious points and scoop out the lint by hand.
(While you’re doing that, look to see how you can reduce the number of turns in the system: the fewer the turns and the shorter the ducts, the more efficiently your dryer will operate.)
Man! Is there anything you don’t know?
I’ve saved the Catholic Questions Link that you provided so much input for. It has been very instrumental in getting me and back into ‘the church’ after a very long absence.
tomndebb, you get my vote for most helpful doper.
The geniuses who built our house decided to have the dryer exhaust pipe take a 90 degree turn upward into the attic. Whenever it clogged (yearly), it took a joint effort between me and my stepdad to unclog it. He was on bottom with the shop-vac nozzle in the “hole-in-the-wall”, and I was in the attic jamming a snake down the hole.
And by the way, when we had a fire hereabouts recently, the Red Cross arrived, and mentioned that one of the major sources of house and apartment fires is dryer vents that haven’t been cleaned / are blocked, etc. So cleaning them is a very good thing.
I second what partly_warmer said… get on cleaning that vent system ASAP. We’ve just moved to a new house and I was having trouble with my dryer. I was so busy with painting, wallpapering and generally moving in that I failed to notice the problem as quickly as I should have – I was just pitching the clothes in the dryer and running out of the laundry room and on to the next job. But after a week or three it was impossible not to notice – although the dryer was nearly brand new, it was taking forever to dry a load of clothes. Towels or jeans would take 2 or 3 runs through and still be damp. And, when I finally paid closer attention, I noticed that the dryer was running way hot. I would start it and within 2 minutes the top of the machine would be too hot to press my hand against! My husband went under the house to check it out and discovered that whoever built our otherwise perfect and beautiful house had hired Joe K’s genious to duct the dryer. Under the house was collapsible ducting twisting and turning among the beams… Kevin says there wasn’t a 4 foot span anywhere without a bend. When he unhooked the ducting to check for clogs he found it wasn’t just clogged, but packed with 15 years worth of dryer lint. Yes, boys and girls, I nearly burned down my dream house – that ducting was a fire hazard of major proportion. And if I hadn’t burned the house down, I would almost certainly have burned out my new dryer – I’m sure I was no more than a load or two away from permanant damage. Anyway, Kevin tore all the old stuff out and replaced it with new. It wasn’t terribly difficult or expensive. The supplies cost about $50.00 and it took him most of a weekend. The worst of it was the laundry backup – by the time I had my dryer back I had 8 or 9 loads of laundry to do. But I can’t echo Duck Duck Goose and recommend that you do all your laundry up first – I recommend that you unplug the dryer until you’re sure the ducts aren’t clogged.
Clogged Ducts Can Be Dangerous! A public service announcement from:
Here’s a trick we did-
Unhook the dryer vent from the dryer and pull the dryer out of your way. Disassemble the vent pipe somewhere near the exit from the house. Feed a plumber’s snake from that point upstream to where the dryer hooks into it. Grab the end of the snake and pull it where you can work on it. Now you have the end of the snake at the dryer end and the body of the snake where you disassembled. Take a cloth and secure it to the end of the snake with duct tape. Don’t make the ball too big or you’ll get it stuck. About the size of a baseball is big enough. Make it real secure. Now go back to the body of the snake and pull the snake back through the pipe. The cloth-duct tape ball will push the lint in front of it. Work it nice and slow and easy and you should get a big wad of lint pushed out of the pipe. Put the pipe back together and rehook the dryer. Dryer venting makes a huge difference in the the efficiency of the dryer- this is well worth the effort in what you’ll save in drying time as well as improve the safety of the system.
I have a slight variation on MSU’s idea. Instead of a cloth, drag a toilet scrub brush through the pipe. I did this and it works okay. I’d suggest first inserting the hose of a shop vac into the ends of the pipe (and where ever you can disconnect the pipe) to get the big bits out first. The bristles of the scrub brush will help remove the stubborn stuck on bits.
We had this problem, and worse yet, we had one bear of a time finding someone who would clean it out. I mean, here is a serious maintenance thing that needs to be handled, and no one would do it! I even called the fire department for suggestions!! I went months without being able to dry clothes. It sucked.
Our best bets ended up being places that clean heating ducts. They said they could do the dryer vent, too. Our problem was made worse by the fact that our exterior vent was more than 20 feet above the ground. As it happens, it turned out we merely had a wasps nest blocking the exterior vent. They didn’t have to suck it all out after all.
One thing we bought was a special drier vent brush. It’s got a perfectly-sized brush head and comes on a long flexible snakelike handle. We bought it at www.improvementscatalog.com. It was ultimately unable to make all the twists and turns in our vent system, but I got about five feet of it in before it was stymied, and the stuff I pulled out was not trifling.
Whee, even worse than we thought. Unfortunately the rocket scientists who built this house laid out the dryer vent system with a convoluted path almost thirty feet long… using 3" ducting. I discovered this when I replaced the fan in the downstairs bathroom and had a chance to peek beneath the upstairs floor joists. There’s obviously no way to clean the ducts in place so I fear some major ceiling excavation is going to be needed to get this done. I’d love to move the dryer as the wash closet is in the middle of the house but there’s no good place to put the dryer close to the exterior wall.
There are professionals, with specialized equipment for cleaning dryer vents. My Brother in law does it on weekends as a side business. I think he charges around 50 bucks. If you can’t find someone in the phone book, ask around at a laundomat, or apartment complex who they use to clean the ductwork. I know that’s who he gets most of his business from. They can probably give you the name of someone in town.
I’d be very careful of the “snake” techniques. If the builders used corrugated aluminium ducting (which hopefully they didn’t, as it’s a bad choice for a non-accessible ducting system), then the snake would be very likely to tear it.
Probably the best first solution is to get a powerful shopvac that works in both suck and blow modes, and try to blow the lint out of the venting system. (Cover the inside connection first to avoid blowing lint all over the room.)
“Probably the best first solution is to get a powerful shopvac that works in both suck and blow modes, and try to blow the lint out of the venting system.”
In newer housing, the ducts are pretty flimsy aluminum in the turns, I wouldn’t poke around violently there because they’ll tear or separate in the joints.
If you go with a shopvac in blow mode, you might consider hooking it up to the outside end of the vent. The dust that’s clogging your pipe is stabilized with respect to air blowing out of the dryer. Blowing in the other direction could release great clouds of it into your utility room. Tying a cloth bag over that end would probably save you a lot of cleanup time.
Is this on the top floor of the building? Can you get into the attic/crawl space above the kitchen? If so, aand the duct is exposed, you can dis-assemble, clean, and re-assemble.
If not, the blow-in-reverse is your best bet, but:
With that length, the stream from a shop-vac is going to dissapate quickly (and, of course, the majority of the lint will be furthest from the external vent). See how much air you can generate, and tie an old pillowcase around the inlet FIRST.
While you’re cleaning the duct it might be a good idea to pop the front of the dryer off and make sure it’s not clogged inside. My dryer started making this funny noise and when I took it apart to look there was a shoebox full of lint packed around the blower. The duct on this dryer is only a foot long but removing the internal lint made it dry clothes a lot better.
