Dryer Vent Cleaning

Lint sticks to damp duct wall. In a climate that spends most of the year humid, the inside of a dryer duct rarely gets fully dry between loads, so every cycle leaves a little more behind than it would in a drier place.

Brevard construction adds the second half of the problem. A lot of homes here run the dryer duct up through the roof rather than out a side wall, which means a long vertical run, at least one elbow, and gravity working against the airflow the whole way.

A short side-wall run can often be cleaned from outside in under an hour. The lint has one direction to go and a straight path to go in.

A through-roof run collects at the elbow and again at the cap, where the flap and the screen are the narrowest points in the system. Those two spots have to be cleaned from both ends or you have moved the blockage rather than removed it.

The clearest signal is a load that needs two cycles when it used to need one. After that: a laundry room that runs warm, a dryer cabinet hot to the touch, no flap movement at the exterior cap while the machine is running, or visible lint around the vent hood outside.

The National Fire Protection Association identifies failure to clean as the leading contributing factor in home clothes dryer fires. It is an hour of work against a risk nobody wants to be on the wrong side of.