Clean Your Dryer Vent to Prevent a Fire

Few people may understand the fire danger posed by clothes dryers when they're not properly maintained. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, however, an estimated 15,500 dryer fires occur in the U.S. each year, causing injuries, deaths and a financial cost of almost one hundred million dollars per year. In addition, improperly vented dryers have been blamed for causing hundreds of cases of carbon monoxide poisoning. Most all of this can be narrowed down to one problem – dryer lint buildup. The solution is simple – regular cleaning of your dryer vent system.

The Danger of Lint

Lint, which is composed of broken fibers from materials being dried in your clothes dryer, is highly combustible and will readily burn when exposed to an ignition source. Clothes dryers have lint traps built into them, and these traps should be cleaned out each and every time before drying a load of clothes. Failure to do so will allow the lint to build up on the lint trap screen, posing not only an increased fire hazard but also causing the drying efficiency of the machine to be lessened due to the obstruction causing reduced air flow.

Clean Your Lint Trap and More

As important as it is to clean your clothes dryer's lint trap before drying every load, there's more to keeping your vent system safe than this. Your dryer exhausts hot air through a vent pipe or metal hose through an outside wall in your home to the atmosphere. If your dryer is placed next to an exterior wall, the vent pipe run can be relatively short, extending just from the dryer, through the wall and to the outside.

Because your lint trap doesn't trap every bit of lint, allowing some amount of lint to make it past the trap and into the vent pipe, this can be a point of lint accumulation. A short vent pipe run is usually fairly easy to keep clean.

Some dryers, however, require much longer vent pipe runs due to the fact that the dryer is located away from an exterior wall. Some vent runs can be quite extensive, twisting and turning through walls, crawl spaces, etc. The longer the run, the easier for lint to build up and, through accumulation, become a fire hazard. These vent systems need to be professionally cleaned every year or two. This is typically not a DIY exercise.