One of the most common causes of house fires is accumulated lint in clothes dryer filters and ducts that ignites from over-heating. It is very important to keep your clothes dryer and its exhaust duct cleaned out.
Your Clothes Dryer is a pretty simple appliance, but it can cause devastating problems if you don’t maintain it properly. When you dry your wet clothes, you take them out of the washing machine and put them into the dryer. When you turn on the dryer, three things happen: heat is produced (either from electric elements or from gas burners), a fan blows warm air into the dryer compartment, and the dryer drum goes around, tumbling the wet clothes so that the warm air gets evenly distributed around them. Your dryer has an exhaust port usually located down at the bottom of the back side. That exhaust port should be connected to an exhaust duct, which in turn should be connected to an exhaust vent located on the exterior wall of your home. The warm air that comes into the dryer picks up moisture and is blown outside the home through the exhaust vent. As that warm, moist air leaves the dryer on its way to the exhaust vent, it first goes through the dryer’s lint filter and then travels through the exhaust duct.
In the process of drying wet clothes, your clothes dryer tumbles the wet clothes. The tumbling action causes lint – very fine fuzzy stuff made from fabric fibers – to be released from your clothes. The lint moves with the air that gets blown out of the dryer. Some of the lint collects in the lint filter and a lot of the lint passes through or around the lint filter into the exhaust duct. The lint is moist and heavy – it’s not like dry dust. As it moves through the exhaust duct it sticks to the inside of the duct. As some of the wet and heavy lint reaches the exhaust vent, some of it sticks to the inside of the vent and to the inside of the flapper. Over time quite a lot of lint can accumulate inside the exhaust duct and on the inside of the vent flapper. This is not good. As more lint accumulates inside the duct and vent, the air moving through the duct and vent slows down and consequently does not adequately remove the moisture from your dryer. Sometimes, so much lint accumulates on the inside of a vent flapper that the air trying to exit the vent can’t even blow the flapper open. As the air flow through the duct and vent is reduced, you may find that it takes longer to dry your clothes.
You may think that taking longer to dry your clothes is a problem. Actually it is a symptom of a much bigger problem – lint accumulation in the exhaust duct. Excessive lint accumulation can become a serious problem because lint is very ignitable – it catches fire very easily. You can prove this to yourself by taking some lint out of the lint filter and placing it in a metal container, like an empty coffee can. Then strike a match and place the flame near the lint. You’ll see the lint catch fire immediately and burn very quickly. Remember, your dryer has a heat source – red hot electric elements or a gas flame. Your dryer is supposed to get hot, but not too hot. If lint accumulates in the exhaust duct and reduces the flow of air out of the dryer, heat can build up inside the dryer. If the heat gets too high, the excessive dryer lint can ignite, which would start a house fire. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has posted an article about this fire hazard on their web site: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/pubs/5022.html
This Is What You Should Do
1 – Every time you put clothes in your dryer, before you start the dryer, pull out the lint filter and clean out the lint on the filter and in the filter compartment.
2 – If you haven’t cleaned the dryer exhaust port in a while, you should to that. Pull your dryer out from the wall – be careful not to kink the gas line. Get behind the dryer and disconnect the exhaust duct from the exhaust port. Then get your vacuum cleaner – a shop vac works really well for this – and suck up as much lint as you can see in the exhaust port. Stick the vacuum hose into the port as far as it will go, allowing it to suck out any lint that is inside the port.
3 – Now, while you’ve got the exhaust duct disconnected from the dryer, use your vacuum to suck out as much lint as possible from inside the duct. Again, run the vacuum hose into the duct as far as it will reach. If your exhaust duct is long and made up of sections, you may need to separate the sections from each other and clean each section. It may not be easy to disconnect the duct from the vent. Sometimes that connection is very difficult to get to and work with. If that’s the case with your situation, don’t worry – you can clean the vent from outside your home.
4 – Now, go outside to where the exhaust vent is located. Take your vacuum cleaner with you. You’ll also need something like an old tooth brush or a long-handled screw driver – something you can use to reach up inside the vent with. Clean away as much lint as possible from outside the vent, on both sides of the flapper, and if you can reach your hand into the duct, get in there and loosen up as much lint as possible. CAUTION: before you do this, make sure there aren’t any wasps or bees in the vent or inside the duct. After you have loosened up as much lint as possible inside the vent and duct, use your vacuum to suck it all out.
5 – Put everything back together. Before you do this, however, inspect the exhaust vent to make sure the flapper is working properly. Replace the vent if necessary. Then inspect the exhaust duct. Make sure it’s not smashed or bent or has holes in it. If so, install new duct material. The best duct material to use is the rigid-wall type instead of the flexible type.
Before you do this maintenance, it’s a good idea to unplug the dryer from the electrical outlet. If you have a gas dryer, it should not be necessary to disconnect the gas line. If it looks like you need to disconnect the gas line in order to clean your exhaust duct, you should call a dryer service technician or your gas company for assistance.
This is just a basic home maintenance project but it’s a pretty important one. It can prevent a house fire.
