Dryer Vent Cleaning for Eagle Mountain Homes

Two loads to dry a load of towels is not a worn-out dryer. It is a restricted vent, and in a house with a modern floor plan the vent is doing a much harder job than most people realize.

Upstairs laundry rooms and what they cost you

Putting the laundry room on the bedroom level is a genuinely good idea and it is standard in the two-story homes across Eagle Mountain. The consequence is that the duct now has to travel from the middle of the second floor out to daylight, which usually means a run through a joist bay, a turn, a climb, and a termination on the roof or high on a gable. Every elbow in that run is worth several feet of straight duct in resistance, and manufacturers set a total equivalent length beyond which the dryer cannot push moist air out. Plenty of these runs were built right at that limit on the day the house was finished. They only need a modest lint deposit to go past it.

A roof termination adds its own problem. Lint that settles in a vertical run does not fall out, it sits on the flapper and on the inside of the hood, and it stays damp. Damp lint packs down into a mat that a leaf blower will not shift. It needs a rotary brush driven the length of the duct with a vacuum on the other end, which is what we bring.

Flexible foil duct, and why it should not be there

The ribbed foil or plastic hose sold in hardware stores is not acceptable duct for a concealed run, and it should not be used behind the dryer either where rigid metal will fit. The ribs catch lint at every corrugation, and the hose crushes when the dryer is pushed back against the wall. We find crushed foil behind laundry room walls often enough that it is worth saying out loud. Rigid smooth-wall metal, joints taped rather than screwed, is what should be in there. Screws project into the airflow and collect lint on purpose.

Why this is a fire question and not just a laundry question

Lint is dry cellulose fiber with air around it, which is close to an ideal fuel. A blocked vent makes the dryer run longer and hotter, and the heat has nowhere to go. That combination is what causes dryer fires, and it builds slowly enough that nobody notices the warning signs. Longer cycles. A hot laundry room. A burning smell. A flapper on the outside hood that no longer opens when the dryer runs. Any of those means the vent needs clearing now.

What we do

We clean the full length from the appliance to the termination, not just the first few feet, brush the hood out from the outside, check the duct material and connections, and measure airflow afterwards so the improvement is a number rather than an impression.