When was the last time your cleaned your dryer vent?

Lint trap is every load. Dryer hose & vent every 10 - 12 months.
HVAC air filter every 3 - 6 months.
Bathroom fan vents every 90 days.
 
The dryer vent in my new townhouse also vents upward, then makes a 90 degree turn and disappears into the ceiling. The dryer vent keeps blowing off the back of the machine and doesn't seem to be working well. I told the landlord a month ago that it needed cleaned and he has still done nothing. I'm used to owning my own home and it's so frustrating to have to rely on someone else to take care of this stuff!!!

Anyway, when I owned my own home I used to clear out the outside of the vent every spring and periodically during the summer, just to make sure there were no bugs or birds taking up residence. Other than that I would just buy a new flexi-vent for the inside at the hardware store every couple years. My vent was only like 3-4 feet long
 
Ours vents to the side of the house. We cleaned it a few months ago and it really wasn’t that bad. Dh took the leaf blower and was able to blow out the lint to the outside.
I clean the lint filter after every dryer cycle.
 
Timely thread! My dryer quit working on me New Year’s Eve. I thought it was a blown fuse, but it turned out there’s a pulley on Samsung dryers that has a tendency to melt (conveniently right outside warranty). Anyway, when I opened the dryer up, there was lint everywhere! And I clean the screen before every load too. So while I was waiting on the new pulley I vacuumed out everything from the dryer and the vent to the wall. That makes it every 2 years, but I think I’m going to clean the vent more often now. Not the inside of the dryer, but we’ll see what other fun surprises Samsung has...
 


My hose is a straight shot to the outside, so it only ever clogs at the exit points in the flaps. Hit that 2-3 times a year. The lint trap is about an every other week cleaning.
Exactly the same. Our outside vent is right on the other side of the wall from the dryer. No "run" to speak of. We clean it every spring and fall, and of course, clean the dryer vent inside the dryer after every load.
 
Good info here, especially on smoke detectors. This is longest we've stayed in a house (have moved average every 4 years up til this house-been here almost 10). My dryer is almost 12 years old-this house and last house straight shot out side of house, vacuumed and cleaned the vent at least once per year. Lint trap in dryer cleaned every cycle. The trap outside does get checked more regularly though-especially in spring!
 


Lint trap every load. Vent/hose to outside when the dryer tells us to. My dryer will turn on a warning light and will not run until it’s been cleaned out. It has not been bad the couple of times we’ve had to do it but there’s a little lip/ledge that the lint catches on that prevents it from going all the way through and can kind of be a pain. It irritates my DH but I like that the dryer errs on the side of caution.
 
My dryer is much too old to have a lint light. I don't think it has any electronics(a thermostat for sure), just a mechanical timer.
 
If you need to dispose of a smoke detector, you may have to dispose of it as hazardous waste since they usually have radioactive material in it. Sometimes you can just mail it back to the company that made it. I had one that was so old, the company was out of business. I had to mail it to a licensed radiological disposal company. And you have to label it correctly if you mail it.

Many years ago, I got a new job quite a distance from our home so we were going to relocate as soon as my husband was able to leave his job. So I was gone for about six weeks before I flew back and the three of us with our dog and cats all moved together. During that time, my husband never emptied the lint trap. He didn't know it was there. Our son was only three, so he had a lot of clothes changes.
 
I do ours twice a year, at the time change, but we have a basement laundry room and the vent goes right out a window above the dryer so it is a short, easy thing to clean. At our old house we had a first-floor laundry room with the vent pipe running through the wall and up to the roof, and I wasn't nearly as good about cleaning that one.
 
Vent in dryer, every load ( machine reminds you). Vent cleaner comes every 2 years,
( costs $75)
Mine exits thru the ceiling. Hoses were replaced this year ..with new machine.
 
I have a brush that I can use to get the lint out of the lint filter slot that gets stuck in there. I highly recommend it. I just moved and we installed the dryer in the new house with a new hose.
 
My son does this for me once a year. The dryer is on the first floor. The vent goes down to the basement, makes a 90 degree turn and then goes about 18 feet to outdoors. 2 years ago he bought a tool to do it. A wire brush with long extension. He cleans at the dryer, where it enters the basement and from the outside.
 
Cleaned it a week ago, right before a new washer and dryer got installed.

Generally, this is a spring/fall item on our to-do list. Our d
Dyer vent run is about 20 feet. We generally clean from the outside, with a chimney-sweep type of tool, specifically for dryer vent cleaning, it attaches to a drill, and is a pretty quick process, as long as you DH and I do it together.
 
Lint trap every load.
Area around the trap whenever I notice some stuff didn't catch in the trap itself.
Outside edge of vent when I'm out there and think about it.
Hose when DH gets ambitious. (It's pretty short, and he has a brush for it.)
 
The easiest way to clean it out yourself is to take the flaps off the outside and blow it out with a leaf blower from the inside. Works like a champ.
We do the same thing, but we also have this long brush thing that attaches to a drill that we use as well to make sure we loosen up all the lint before we blow it out.
 
If you use dryer sheets vs. liquid softner, just cleaning the dryer lint filter is not sufficient. The lint filter gets clogged with the sheet's residue. To see if yours is clogged - take it out and run water through it - if it hardly flows through, it needs a good cleaning with a brush.

Leaving it clogged lowers the efficiency of your dryer as it has to work harder to push air through - also a fire hazard!

This was recommended to me - I tried it, sure enough, mine was clogged, not too much though, as I mostly use liquid. A friends' was clogged to a point that NO water passed through the screen.
 
I clean the vent insert every other load but I've never vacuumed the inside.

Thanks! I didn't even know about this. But I just asked DH and he said that he used to do it once a year, while I was out of town. But if anything ever happened to him, I wouldn't have known it needed to be done. And our dryer's about 15 years old.
 

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