Dryer vent cleaning in The Lakes and Lakeshore

South of Baseline around the waterways, Rural to McClintock

Fifty years on the original run

The Lakes went in during the seventies as one of the more distinctive developments in the East Valley, built around man-made waterways with a mix of single-story and split-level homes.

The vent configuration is mostly straightforward. The duct runs up about eight feet inside the wall and out the exterior wall nearest the dryer. One turn, short run. Mechanically this is the easy version of our job.

The difficulty is not the geometry, it is the calendar. Many of these homes have never had the vent serviced once in fifty years. The current owner is frequently the second or third, and nobody along the way thought about it, because a dryer vent is invisible until it stops working.

These jobs produce some of the largest piles we make in Tempe. Fifty years of accumulation in an eight-foot run is a genuinely startling amount of material.

The waterway question, answered honestly

People ask whether living on the water makes their vent worse. The honest answer is that it changes less than you would think, and the real answer is more interesting.

The waterways raise local humidity slightly, mostly in summer and mostly in homes right on the edge. That does not accelerate lint accumulation, because buildup is driven by run length, elbows and how much laundry you do, not by ambient moisture.

What it does is make an existing blockage obvious sooner. A restricted duct already struggles to carry moisture out of the machine. Feed it more humid intake air and the dryer has to work measurably harder for the same result. That is why we get more calls out of this neighborhood in July and August, and why people conclude the monsoon broke their dryer. It did not. It exposed something that had been building for years.

What fifty years does to the hardware

The duct in the wall holds up fine. Everything attached to it does not.

• The transition hose is frequently original foil, gone brittle, cracked along the ridges and half collapsed under its own weight
• The exterior flapper has been in direct sun since the Ford administration. They warp, the hinge seizes, and they stop closing
• The joints in this era were commonly taped rather than mechanically fastened, and tape does not last fifty years
• Bird access through flappers that have been stuck open for a decade, helped along by mature landscaping and the water

Run your dryer and watch the flap from outside. If it does not lift, that alone is your problem and it is a cheap fix.

Source: National Fire Protection Association, Home Fires Involving Clothes Dryers and Washing Machines.

What the job looks like here

1. Inspect the run. We find where it goes and how it terminates, check the exterior cap or roof hood, and look at the transition hose behind the machine. A surprising number of problems sit in the first three feet.
2. Work it from the outside with the dryer running. We leave the machine running the whole time we are at the termination, so the air it is pushing carries the lint we agitate straight out of the run instead of letting it settle back down the pipe. It makes a mess outside. We clean that up.
3. Work it from the inside. Machine unplugged, hose disconnected, dryer pulled back. We feed the brush through the vent from inside, bring the lint down toward us, and vacuum it up out of the wall rather than leaving it to resettle.
4. Both ends on a long run, one end on a short one. A long run with several elbows gets worked from both sides, because a brush fed from one end alone never properly reaches the far half. A short straight run does not need it and we will not pretend otherwise.
5. Put it back and show you. Dryer reconnected where it belongs, run to confirm, and the pile of what came out sitting where you can look at it.

How often you should be doing this

Every 10 months for a normal household. That is the schedule, not a suggestion.

• Every 10 months for a typical home
• Every 4 to 6 months for a big family, or a rental with several tenants sharing one machine
• Monthly for commercial machines

If you are waiting until the dryer gets slow to call somebody, you are not due for a cleaning. You are already about a year past due. A slow dryer is not the trigger, it is the symptom of a run that has been restricting airflow and cooking the machine for months before anybody noticed.

Questions from The Lakes and Lakeshore homeowners

Other Tempe areas we cover

Maple-Ash and Mitchell Park · Warner Ranch and South Tempe · Broadmor and Tempe Gardens · Escalante, Holdeman and Victory Acres · Dava, Optimist Park and central Tempe