Cleaning Your Dryer Duct
Dryer vents should be cleaned out periodically to maximize the efficiency of your dryer and prevent house fires. If your house is like mine, your vent might be too long to clean out by hand, in which case a specialized brushed might be needed. Be sure to watch the video to see why this experience was so oddly satisfying!
I purchased an "Everbuilt Drill Powered Duct Brush" at my local home improvement store for about $20.
Unplug and move the dryer out of the way...
...an unhook the vent connection tube from the wall.
The brush comes with four 2-ft extensions, for a full length of 8 feet. Since I was working in a small space in my laundry room, I had to add the 2 ft extenders one-by-one as I pushed the brush into the duct.
Insert the brush into the entrance to the vent, and turn on the drill. Push the brush slowly into the vent, moving in and out of the vent to clean it out. (You could also complete this whole process without the drill, just using some elbow grease, but where's the fun in that?)
As you add extensions to the brush, use some duct tape around the connections to ensure they don't come apart inside the duct.
The brush extenders are flexible, so if you encounter resistance, push through it: you have either encountered a blockage of lint or a bend in the vent structure, and since the vent should be made of aluminum, it would be extremely difficult to puncture it. Feel free to apply stronger, even pressure to get past the blockage.
Since my dryer vent is at least 15 feet long before it reaches the outside of my house, I had to repeat the process from the outside.
Then I used a leaf blower to further clean out any loosened lint that was still inside the vent. If you have a battery powered leaf blower, you could blow from the inside of the house to the outside; mine is gas-powered, so I had to blow from the outside-in, or else my home smoke detector would go off. (You could also use a Shop Vac on "blow" mode.)
While I was at it, I set up a camera on the inside to film the lint being blown out of the vent...because, why not?
Then I just replaced the vent extension to the dryer, and moved the dryer back into place!
Comments
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Hi, I can't imagine that I am the only one to comment on your video, but I want to point out that it was recommended to me by the fire department of the town where I was renting a home about twenty years ago, after having a lint fire in the back of the rental home's dryer, that you should remover the back panel of your dryer regularly and vacuum it out to remove dust that accumulates in it. I have actually used a shop vac to remove the dust build up in my vent by just putting my hose down the vent, because it is only about 5 feet into my basement laundry room. I repeated the procedure from the inside out. Thanks for sharing your video.
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Thank you for your comment! We recently replaced the dryer in the video, after trying to fix it myself, and I can totally see why that is a good idea!
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