I got a call today from a client from years ago, dating back to when I was still repairing appliances. He called to say that his wife had been drying her first load of clothes of the day and when she went to put in the second, the dryer would not respond. I asked him a couple of questions, gave him the likely cause of the problem, and since I have long since left the area in which he lives, I pointed him in the right direction to find someone to have it fixed.
All in a day’s work for someone who has spent years in the service industry meeting and helping clients. Once you create that successful relationship, you’re always kind of on call, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Once we hung up I went back to work, but it struck me that his entire call would make for a great blog post, so here we are!
Dryers, and all appliances really, come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and flavors. The quality of those appliances will vary across the numerous manufacturers, and while I do have my opinions from my days as a Friendly Neighborhood Service Technician, I won’t be offering those today. Perhaps we’ll save that for another post. The important thing about any dryer on the market is that you care for it properly, otherwise you will be shopping for another unit sooner rather than later.
The lifespan of the average dryer properly cared for and used as directed can easily be well over 20 years. That’s not to say there will not be periods of required repair and maintenance during that time, but dryers, even those built in these times of “manufactured obsolescence” tend to last the longest of any other appliance. The joke amongst repair techs is, the landfills are littered with perfectly good dryers because people want matching sets. Sad, but true.
So, what should you be doing to care for your dryer? First off, read the owners manual. I know, it seems silly to read a manual for something you have been operating since you were a kid, but read it anyway. If you learn one thing from your owner’s manual that you didn’t know before, it was worth it. Technology has created some interesting features, so check it out. Second, see in the manual where it says you need to clean the lint screen after EVERY load? Highlight that in your head. It needs to be done, even if there’s not that much lint in the screen. Clean it.
Now then, any decent service tech will recommend that you have your dryer cleaned once a year. “Wait, what? I’ve cleaned my lint screen religiously after every load and I STILL need to have the dryer cleaned annually?” Yes. A dryer is not a sealed system, or even a tight one. The lint captured in the screen is just a portion of what’s actually there. Some of it will be transferred into the vent line, some of it will make it out of the vent and go wherever lint goes when it leaves the vent, and the rest, unfortunately, ends up in your dryer cavity, sitting there waiting (with a bunch of single socks and pocket change) to cause trouble. If you don’t have your dryer cleaned out on a semi-regular basis, you drastically increase the chances of a lint fire within your dryer. Having seen the aftermath of numerous such dryer fires, trust me, you don’t want that.
“Does it matter whether I have a gas or electric dryer?” Nope. Lint does not care what heat source you have chosen. It appears in the electrified and the non-electrified alike. The build up is the same, as are the recommendations for regular cleaning. Gas units don’t have elements that will be adversely affected by lint and possibly burn out, but beyond that, there is no difference.
Now we get to those crazy vent lines. If your dryer is on an exterior wall and vents directly outside, you can ignore the rest of this paragraph. Much like water heaters in attics, some builder at some point decided they would reinvent the wheel and put the laundry on an internal wall and just run the vent up into and through the attic onto the roof. No problem, right? Sure, for a couple of years. Have you ever seen anything made of paper mache? It’s paper, wet down, coated with glue, then allowed to dry. You can make all sorts of cool shapes and things out of it, very handy. Lint, when wet, acts very much like paper mache, only it sticks to and hardens within your dryer vent line. Over time the hardened lint builds up and starts to choke the line off. The hard lint is still very flammable, but when it forms in your vent lines it also creates backpressure on the dryer, essentially making it more difficult for the dryer to push the air out the vent. As back-pressure increases so does the heat inside the unit and eventually the dryer blows a fuse or an element. The easiest way to tell the difference is that the dryer will almost always still run with a bad element, it just won’t dry. A blown fuse kills power to the unit completely, dead stop. With all this in mind, hopefully you can see how having your dryer vent cleaned every couple of years is pretty important. Most service techs will tell you this before they replace the fuse, so as not to charge you twice, but there are those techs out there who can’t see past their noses or simply don’t know, and then you’re stuck with multiple calls and charges. In the past we called chimney sweeps to clean vents, and I’m sure they still do a great job, but in recent times duct cleaning services for HVAC have taken on dryer vent business as well, and they have all the fancy cameras and such as well, if you’re into that sort of thing.
I told the folks with exterior vents they could skip the last paragraph, but now that you’re all back together I’ll cover something else you need to make sure you have, and that’s a screen on your dryer vent, especially if it’s near ground level. I have pulled rats, birds, squirrels, snakes and lizards out of dryers, and I can tell you without a doubt that not all of them were dead. I can also tell you the lady standing behind me when I opened her dryer to find a very live and angry snake will likely never set foot in her laundry room again. Local hardware stores sell a very nice screen that fits over your dryer vent and prevents the intrusion of all those little pests who love warmth in the winter and furry food any time of the year. The squirrels? They were nesting and had filled the entire vent full of pecan shells from the backyard. Nature finds a way if you let it. You will want to check this screen every year or so because lint does build up even on the larger mesh of the screen and can cause blockage.
Home inspectors see some amazing things through the course of our inspections. I could write a book just on those things, but in the course of my own inspections I try to educate my clients in addition to offering them a top-notch inspection. Moving into a new to you home comes with all manner of things to think about, with dryer vents being just one of them. I hope passing a little of my own experience about dryer maintenance and vents helps someone out there in some way, even if I never meet them personally. Until next week!
