Line Up Your Ducts.

Wendy was concerned that our clothes dryer vent at our home in London could be a fire hazard due to the build up of lint in the duct work.  At our condo, our board members in their usual paranoia, have our dryer ducts vacuumed out by a service company every year at a cost of hundreds of dollars. It would be very interesting to see how much they actually get out of the 40 or so condo pipes each year. My guess is you could carry it all in a large Zip bag.

Today I want to tell you what you may already know or at least may have suspected.  It's been over fifteen years since we had our and metallic corrugated dryer vent installed. It met the code back then and I assume and it still does. Keep reading...

  I hooked up our Dyson vacuum cleaner to a swimming pool vacuum hose and and inserted in slowly, agitating in back and forth until it reached a pre-measured length to the back of the dryer.  In all those fifteen years and or so the total amount of lint that I sucked out of the vent line did not even amount to a full vacuum cleaner load.   Over the years most of the lint particles simple move along with the air and are expelled outside. I confirmed with a flashlight visual check that the line was clean. There was a little lint that came from the horizontal part of the line and as you might think hardly any in the vertical part.  Maybe 2 large hand-fulls of fluff. That's over 15 years!

A long time ago a reputable furnace man explained to me why most houses never need "duct cleaning" and I would suppose that the same is true for the dryer duct. He used a moving stream or brook in his illustration. Imagine a crystal clear stream running down a hillside. The water has been running this way for eternity. Only if you wade into the water and stir up the bottom does the sediment stir up and cloud the stream. In thousands of years nobody has had to clean the stream so why would you think the ducts in your home were any different. If they are not disturbed they will not distribute dirt.

The duct cleaning industry is huge and as long as gullible people believe them, these companies will thrive. If your dyer duct was metal and not cheap, combustible plastic as some were, you probably have nothing to worry about, but for peace of mind, spend 15 minutes, try using your vacuum cleaner as I did. Just be sure to visually check the line after to make sure you didn't dislodge the vent hose from the back of the dryer.

DANGER: If you have any sort of screen or grill work over your dryer outlet, it WILL catch lint. YOU MUST MAKE SURE YOUR LINT FILTERS AND SCREENS ARE NOT BLOCKED.
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