It’s pretty standard in the US (someone correct me if I’m wrong) for dryers to vent to the outside with a conduit like the one below. Is this not done for dryers in basements? (We don’t have basements in South Texas.)
That connects the dryer to an opening on the outside of the house like this:
And that vent can get clogged with lint if you’re not vigilant about cleaning the lint trap in the dryer.
Yeah, mine is all metal, not metalized plastic. But otherwise exactly the same. I believe that’s standard in the US. Otherwise both heat and water would build up somewhere.
And the lint would collect as well, which can be a fire hazard.
Agreed. But not universal. When we moved into our house, we discovered the previous owner had a box where the dryer vented inside. I think he was trying to “save” the heat. The house was built with a normal vent to the outside, so restoring it to standard was very easy.
Probably depends in part on the age of the house - my mother’s house was built in about 1920 or so. My guess is that a dryer got there in the late 70s early 80s and whoever got the first one didn’t want to pay for cutting through the concrete foundation so they went with one of those indoor vents.
Or it could be a matter of your preferences.I think that line-dried towels are too scratchy and stiff, but I don’t think that most lined-dried clothing is scratchy/stiff and I actually prefer line-dried sheets to tumble-dried. (although I don’t line dry my sheets for other reasons)
Nope. I’ve never had a vented dryer in this building, and I’ve been here 20 years. The dryer actually sits on top of the washer in an inside niche, within the master bathroom.
Until this year I had a condenser type dryer, which was connected to the drain, so I never had to empty a tank. However, it did make the bathroom a bit warm and humid, so we had to be careful to make sure the windows were open enough.
This year we bought a new heat pump dryer, which is also connected to the drain, so there’s no need to empty a tank. I don’t really need to open the window.
Here’s an article I found which explains about the different types of dryers. Most of the articles I found were for the U.K. or Australia, but it is possible to buy heat pump dryers in the U.S. as well.
My plumber says that the pipe would survive a lint fire – he says if the lint gets stuck, it can explode, which makes a huge bang and is very exciting, but not very dangerous. He also said we shouldn’t use the plasticized pipe, because it will not contain a lint explosion, and could start a fire.
Of course, our laundry is in the basement, in a room that’s mostly cement walls, so I’m not too worried about it.
I live in a condo development, and we have dryer vent clean-out done every year. At first, it was voluntary. Now, it’s mandatory explicity because of the fire hazard. With a lot of connected units, fire is definitely scary.
There’s two different kinds of dryers. Standard/vented and condensing/unvented. I suspect the European models are more of the condensing/unvented variety. Standard/vented dryers also tend to come in two flavors, electric and gas.
Electric dryers are as simple as they get, they just have resistance strip heaters inside and the hot moist air picked up from the clothes is then blown outside. My family had one when I was a kid, and there was a diverter damper on the vent pipe that let us redirect the air into the house. We put one of Mom’s old stockings over the outlet to catch the lint, and you can get other devices that blow the air over a water bath to catch the lint too. In a cold climate this is a nice way to not waste that heat and get some moisture into the air.
You can’t do that with a vented gas dryer though. Functionally they behave pretty similarly to electrics. They just burn natural gas (or propane?) to heat the air and dry the clothes. While the temperature is high enough for the moisture of the gas combustion to make little difference in the drying capacity, it does cause a net increase in discharged moisture out the vent. It’s also not safe to vent to the inside since it could cause carbon monoxide buildup. I do not believe gas dryers have a heat exchanger like you’d find in a furnace, they’re just blowing the combustion gasses right into the drum (along with additional air from the room). Even if there were (I’m curious if such beasts exist), they blow all the air out through one vent so it’s not separable.
Condensing/unvented dryers are basically heat pumps, or more specifically, dehumidifiers. They use a refrigeration cycle to dehumidify the air in the dryer and flush it down a drain rather than blowing the evaporated moisture outside. They’re more energy efficient and not as tough on clothes, but they’re slower and don’t have the same sanitizing abilities. You don’t need to run a big vent pipe however, they don’t suck air out of your house, and many don’t even require you to plumb them into a drain, as long as you’re ok with emptying the condensate tank after every load. By the nature of their operation, they do generate some heat in the space they occupy, just like a dehumidifier does.
Does it just vent right into the room? Seems like it would be kind of messy with lint that gets thru the dryer filter.
That’s what I’m used to seeing. Sometimes they can be vented directly out of a cutout in window that goes to an outside window well.
This is funny because that’s exactly what mine looks like, and the siding is almost an exact match. If it wasn’t -25F with a -50F wind chill along with a ground blizzard, I’d take a picture and post it.
I just cleaned mine last week, line and dryer both, and got about the same amount of lint I would get from the lint trap after running a load of towels. I do mine two or three times a year. I wonder if the fires are from people that never clean their vent lines.
The ones that I’m familiar with go just above the concrete line, so it’s only thru wood and drywall. That part is a metal tube. The flex hooks onto that and then to the back of the dryer. That way you can just pop off the flex and clean that while you are inside and you don’t need any kind of long handled brush. Basically, you can clear the whole line from the comfort of your house.
This is the only one I really don’t like. I like the fluffy towels for showering. I do think clothing is stiff when air dried, but that works itself out pretty quick.
Interesting, I’ve never heard of a set up like that before. Then again, I don’t usually look at my friends dryer setups too often, it’s possible they are more common than I thought. 
The energy efficient part surprises me. It seems dehumidifying would be a longer process than heat.
It used to have one of those inside venting contraptions, where you connect the hose to a container with water that is supposed to catch the lint. I assume it still does , but I don’t actually know.
There isn’t any wood and drywall - even the part of the basement that is above ground has concrete walls. And in this particular one, there aren’t any windows on the side of the building with the water line to put the vent hose through.
Longer yes, but it’s using a lot less power. If a vented electric dryer uses 2,500 watts and a cycle takes one hour that’s 2.5 kWh. A heat pump dryer may only use 750 watts and even if it takes twice as long, that’s still only 1.5 kWh. Plus you’re not sucking conditioned air from the room and blowing it outside
I forget, you’re in NY, right? We live in Manhattan, and about 20 years ago we bought the apartment next door to us and combined them, allowing us room for a washer/dryer to be installed and we had to do a lot of refiguring the layout to get the dryer by a window so we could vent it outside. We are on the top floor so we really didn’t need any extra heat from the dryer. It was a whole big deal at that time.
Now I’m wondering if the old washer/dryer setups in the basement back then didn’t work with inside venting. They probably did because it was always hot down there, even with a ceiling fan going. They finally took them out about ten years ago, every apartment now has in unit washer/dryers.
Interesting. I’m going to have to take a look at my dryer now and see what it says.
Yes, NYC but not Manhattan. And I just realized, my mother’s 2 family house doesn’t have any windows on the side of the building with the water lines and the kitchens and bathrooms. The bathrooms have windows into an old shaft of some kind ( air? Dumbwaiter? I don’t know) and the kitchen windows are on a different wall ( which couldn’t have a window in the basement, as there is a patio there). So the only way to have the washer and dryer near each other without major work was to have the dryer vent indoors.
I kind of wondered if the older brick type of buildings didn’t all have inside venting when they were built. Probably easier than leaving/making an outside hole thru the bricks for venting every apartment in the building. Or even just for basement laundry rooms. The extra heat was probably welcome back in the olden days once it got cooler.
Probably not - because most older, brick type rental buildings in NYC don’t/didn’t even allow washers or dryers in the apartments. My son is in the process of buying into a limited equity co-op that even now does not allow washers/dryers in the apts. Newer buildings are different - my son’s current apartment has a washer and dryer, but the building was built in 2019.
…never had dryers in the first place. They didn’t start to come on the market until the 1950s, and condenser/heat pump dryers didn’t show up until decades later. In my home growing up (1927) and my current apartment (1914) they just punched out a pane of glass (or more) in a basement window and replaced it with a piece of sheet metal to run the vent(s) through. No idea when that was done though.
Duh, of course not, what was I thinking. I guess I have to knock off the day drinking!
Yes, some gas dryers, and gas stoves, use propane. Mine do.