The ducting is in the ceiling of the ground floor and isn’t really accessable without cutting a lot of sheetrock. I don’t think a snake will work because of the convluted path and from what I did have to work on with the bathroom vent I found that none of the joints are secure as they were done with tape wich has long since dried to dust. I’d hate to see us knock a joint loose then start filling the joist area with flammable lint. Long term I think we’re going to have to break into the ceiling and replace the ducting with 6" diameter metal and rivet all the joints.
You might want to rethink using rivets to join sections of duct together; if they protrude into the duct, they’ll snag particles of lint from the air as it passes through. One alternative would be to use clamps, which act like giant jubilee clips to hold the sections together. One example would be the Dura Safe vent kits sold by Whirlpool (see “Accessories” on whirlpool.com), which should work with any dryer, seeing as they all have a 4" vent connection.
This is what I use on my dryer, despite the fact that white vinyl vent hose is still legal here in the UK. The clamps hold everything together securely, but can be unfastened easily if you want to disassemble the duct for cleaning.
After I had lived here for a couple of years, I had a plumber in the crawl space for something. He emerged, saying, “Did you know there’s no duct between your dryer and the outside vent?”:eek: There was no sign of a duct having ever been there. In the 14 years since the house was built, the moisture and lint had just been blowing into the crawl space. I got some of that flexi duct stuff, which clogged up in about 60 days. This meant a load of clothes took about 70 minutes to dry. The dryer mechanic diagnosed the clogged line, and said dryer makers no longer recommend anything but rigid ducts. He said we were lucky to have not had a fire.
The new duct, a 15 foot straight run, clogged up some, too. I got one of those vent snakes from ImprovementsCatalog. I took off the end vent, and with the dryer running on Air, I repeatedly schooched the snake in and out, a little further each time. Lots of lint came out. Alas, the snake is only 10 feet long, but it helped a lot. Maybe eventually I’ll wrestle the dryer out of the laundry closet to get the other 5 feet, and then hire a skinny kid to reassemble the elbows behind the dryer. 