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If you have an electric dryer, each drying cycle of 45-60 minutes adds about $.75 to your power bill. If your dryer vent is clogged with lint, it could require an additional 2-3 cycles to dry your clothes, because your dryer needs good air flow to operate properly. If you run your dryer several times in a row to dry your clothes, it could cause it to overheat and start a fire.
An average lint trap catches about 60% of your dryer lint, while the remaining 40% goes through your dryer to the venting and hopefully to the outside of your home.
Use Metal dryer ducting to help prevent dryer fires. Flexible dryer ducts made of foil or plastic are inexpensive and easier to work with, but are the most problematic because they can sag and let lint build up at low points and in the ridges. Metal ducting won't sag, and if a fire does start a metal duct will more likely contain it.
Whichever kind of ducting you have, you should have it cleaned at least once yearly, and remove any visible lint from the screen each time you use your dryer.
When drying clothes stained with chemicals such as gasoline, cooking oils, cleaning agents, or finishing oils and stains, wash the clothing a few times to minimize the amount of these chemicals on the clothing, and hange to up to dry instead of using a dryer.
Avoid the use of liquid fabric softeners on all cotton clothing made of fleece, terry cloth, or velour. Liquid fabric softener added to rinse water accelerates the burning speed of these fabrics. If you want a softener, use dryer sheets instead.
There are many things wrong in this picture. For starters, the plastic ducting needs to be removed and have rigid ducting installed. Secondly, sagging dryer duct does not allow proper air flow therefore causing lint build-up in the lower section of the duct.
If you have dryer duct that is made of plastic or foil, or duct that has fallen down, we can repair or replace that for you and clean out the vent as afterwards.
It's hard to judge in this picture, but there was enough dryer lint in this vent to fill a kitchen garbage bag.
Most of time it takes homeowners so long to call us to clean out their dryer vent this is the typical result. The dryer lint is so flammable that I keep a good supply in my emergency camping kit for a firestarter when natural material isn't available.
This is the blower housing where the blower fan wheel spins when the motor runs.
This dryer blower housing was so clogged the wheel wouldn't turn at all, so it caused the dryer to overheat and burned out several safety switches. This is on a gas dryer, and could have caused a major fire at a rental house of one of our Kuna customers had the dryer heated up enough to ignite the natural gas.
According to The National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA), clogged dryer vents are a definite hazard causing property damage, bodily injury, and even death.
18,000 structure fires a year in the United States are caused by clogged or blocked dryer vents.