When a gas or electric clothes dryer runs, it blows warmed air into a revolving drum that tumbles your laundry during the drying cycle. The warmed air is blown right through the drum and out an exhaust port at the base of the appliance in the rear. By law, this exhaust port has to be connected to outside air. This could mean connecting the dryer exhaust port to an opening in a basement window for clothes dryers located in a basement. For dryers on an upper floor, it usually means connecting the dryer exhaust port to a matching port in the wall of the laundry room. This matching port leads into a dryer duct that the home builder routed to outside air but concealed inside one or more walls.
The homeowner has to connect, or hire someone to connect, the exhaust port on his dryer to whatever kind of opening he or she has to outside air. This connector is usually a solid-wall or flexible-wall metal hose with fittings that allow it to be attached to the dryer exhaust port at one end and to the opening to outside air at the other end. In the bad old days, this connector could be made of foil or plastic but those have fallen out of use because they catch fire easily. In most places both foil and plastic are now forbidden by local building codes. So, is your home up to the dryer exhaust duct code?
When Safety King offers “dryer duct cleaning” or “dryer vent cleaning” to our customers, we are talking about cleaning of the entire passageway from the dryer’s exhaust port all the way to outside air. In many homes and businesses, this means cleaning of the connector from the dryer exhaust port to the dryer duct port in the wall of the laundry room, and it also means cleaning of the entire length of the dryer duct in the wall all the way to outside air.
Now you can see how important it is to follow the dryer exhaust duct code. In future posts we will describe how a clothes dryer works, how it generates lint, how the lint collects in the dryer duct and how we remove it in a dryer duct cleaning.