Fire Hazard No More

When my parents visited a couple of weeks ago, we really put them to work! I asked them to help us dissect our dryer and dryer vents to clean out the lint, a project on my New Years to-do list. They came prepared, bringing with them a kit from Lowes with all the parts necessary to make everything good as new. (This is the kit--I can't seem to find it on Lowe's website.) It was good to have the extra help, since this turned out to be a 4 person job (or 3 person plus 1 person to take the pictures....). I'm here to tell you that it wasn't as hard or scary as we thought--actually, it was kinda cool--and it's something you should do to make your dryer run more efficiently (we've noticed an incredible difference in drying times) and safely.

First we unplugged and detached the dryer from the vent and pushed it away from the wall. We tipped it back and propped it up on some food cans, which are conveniently stored in the basement not far from the dryer. D got to work prying the front off the dryer.

 With the front detached, we went to work on the dust and lint. We'd already removed the lint trap and shoved a brush in there to dislodge the lint that remains stuck inside. Now we went at it from the bottom.  See all the dust coming out on the wire brush? In addition to the brush, we used the handheld brush attachments on our vacuum to really get the surfaces lint-free.

Next we unscrewed the black case from the picture above, to clean inside it. You can see how nasty that is. We have no idea when this was last done, but it's been at least a year and a half that we've lived here and it's pretty unlikely that the previous owners went through all this trouble right before they sold the house.

 Die lint! Die! Feel the wrath of my vacuum!

With the dryer lint-free, it was time to attach the vent. The kit included a rotary brush that attaches to a drill with screw-on extension tubes to make the brush be able to run the entire length of the vent. You're supposed to tape the extension tubes and make sure never to rotate them in reverse, to make sure they don't come unscrewed inside the vent. With the extension tubes attached, D started feeding the brush through the vent hole.

As a side discovery to this project, we realized our vent hole doesn't seal completely when not in use. It's supposed to have a little trap door that closes when the dryer isn't blowing air out and that the trap door is broken. Also the vent isn't very well sealed to the house. We need to buy a new vent to keep the cold air sealed out of the basement (score one for increased energy savings), so stay tuned for a future post on that repair.

At the same time D was running the brush through the vents, my parents attached the shopo vac to the bottom of the vent (with a connector that came in the kit) to suck up all the lint that D was dislodging.

Despite all the L turns in our vents and thanks to a little coaxing, the brush made it all the way through the system.

 Here is D pulling the brush back out--but not with the drill in reverse!

Next we ran the brush up from the bottom, just to make sure that everything was clean. Another special connector in the kit lets you run the shop-vac and the brush through at the same time. Again, no trouble getting through those sharp turns.

The hardest part turned out to be reattaching the dryer to the vent. Armed with foil tape, a new flexible tube, and a ring connector, D struggled to get everything back together. Since the dryer was already much closer to the wall by then, all the pictures just looked like a guy trapped behind a dryer, so I'll leave that to your imagination. It is unfortunately a one-man job, so the rest of us just started putting everything else back together. One glance at the contents of the shop-vac (not to mention the regular vacuum, which we used for the more precise clean up for the front of the dryer) proved that it was a good thing we had cleaned everything out. It was pretty full of lint and dust. And now we know we are good for 2 to 3 years until we have to do it again.