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Far too many people won’t even change a furnace filter on a regular basis, so they sure won’t clean their dryer ducts, as has been suggested on a couple of sites recently. In some homes you can’t even get to the dryer duct without pulling the dryer away from the wall, which then flexes the gas line connection, and the more you flex that the more you invite a gas leak. I think on my dryer I’d actually have to disconnect the gas line to even get to the duct. So the dryer duct gets replaced when I get a new dryer (and a good dryer can last a VERY long time) but otherwise that duct isn’t going to get cleaned, even though I know it could use a cleaning.
And sometimes it’s just impossible — someone in my family recently bought a new house and believe it or not, the dryer vent duct runs inside the wall for about 98% of its length! I don’t know how anyone could ever take that apart to clean it, without actually doing some demolition work first!
BUT, why don’t the home appliance makers make vent-cleaning dryers? If they can make self-defrosting refrigerators and self-cleaning ovens, why not a dryer where you could press a button and it would send a hurricane-force blast through the vent that would (hopefully) blast out most or all of the gunk? All they’d need to do is include something akin to a heavy-duty leaf blower and some kind of valve to direct the full force of it down the vent. People who will go fifty years without cleaning a dryer vent might push that button once a week (especially in households with kids, because the kids would want to go outside and see all the gunk come flying out!).
In pricier models you could even set it to do an automatic cleaning once a week (or at least light a reminder if the button hasn’t been pushed after a certain number of loads). Only drawback I can think of is you might have to replace that el cheapo plastic dryer vent on the outside of your home with something a BIT more sturdy!
I’d definitely pay extra for this feature and be glad to do it (in fact, I’d buy a new dryer JUST to get this feature). I’m sure it would be well worth it in energy savings and convenience!
The other thing is, why don’t they just use larger dryer vent pipes to begin with? The size they are using now has more or less been the standard since the inception of the clothes dryer and it has been proven that lint can clog that size pipe and reduce dryer efficiency. It would make a LOT more sense if they’d use a larger vent size to start with.
It just seems to me that with all the bright, inventive minds around somebody should come up with a way to deal with this problem that does not require a homeowner to disassemble their dryer ducts, which I can guarantee you that probably 95% of the population will never do. Even the folks who know they should do it and perhaps even want to do it are thwarted by the inconvenience (and sometimes the impossibility) of doing it.
(And NO, you f—ing preachy environmentalists, I will NOT use a clothesline. Not only are they too damn much work, but I don’t want bird droppings, road dust, and whatever other debris the wind picks up all over my clean clothes!!!)
Related articles
- Clean Out Your Dryer Lint (17/365) (thesimpledollar.com)
- Dryer Vent Alarm Provides Early Warning Detection For Potential Dryer Fires (prweb.com)
Robert Coates said
Why there isn’t an automatic duct cleaning feature on dryers –
1. Potential liability from lawsuits if a house burns down.
2. Nobody says “I won’t buy that unless it has that feature.”
3. “Hurricane blast” of wind would require a much more expensive, heavy, and energy-consuming motor. Don’t a lot of people decide which model to buy based on the Energy Star “average cost to operate per year” ratings?
michigantelephone said
Robert:
1. I would think you could make a better case that current dryers are inherently unsafe because they allow enough lint to accumulate in the ductwork to (rarely) cause fires, and this would make them safer.
2. If even ONE dryer offered that feature, I wouldn’t buy any other! (Assuming, of course, that the dryer wasn’t otherwise a piece of junk, and that the manufacturer didn’t try to price it as if it were made of solid gold.)
3. So? Given the potential energy savings, people would pay for it. Remember, they sell leaf blowers for under $100, and also the hurricane-force blower motor would only be running for a relatively short time (just long enough to clean the lint out). I can’t imagine it would increase the price of a dryer more than a couple hundred bucks (and probably a lot less if the feature catches on) and I would gladly pay that because I’d almost certainly make it back in natural gas savings!
Do they include the cost of the defrost cycle in the energy ratings of refrigerator/freezers? Same principle.
Jay said
Solving the the problem of build-up of lint seems be related to the length of the vent pipe, number of bends required and material of the pipe:
1. Change the building code to limit the length of pipe and number of bends permitted between dryer and ‘outside’.(only works for new homes)
2. Return to the semi-rigid smooth stove pipe style venting, used until about 20 years ago, as it had significantly less lint build-up.
3. Require the use of pipe with a ‘slippery coating’(teflon).
lgaetz said
Let me start by saying that I think this is an excellent idea, and is at least 30 years overdue. If you want to begin a career as a patent troll (assuming you aren’t one now), this is a good place to start. In my fine tradition of taking decent ideas and throwing darts at them, there are a few problems, some of which may be difficult to solve:
The idea of increasing the duct size is probably not a good one. Increasing duct size will slow the air down, increasing the rate of lint accumulation and will allow more lint to accumulate before it becomes a noticeable performance issue. More lint means more fuel in the event of a fire, etc. etc.
Your comparison to a leaf blower is apt, but you may have forgotten a small detail. It is air velocity that will perform the cleansing action on the duct, and you rightfully point out that a $100 leaf blower can produce such a velocity. But that velocity is only achievable a the very narrow outlet at the tip of the leaf blower nozzle, which on $100 models is less than 2″ diameter. A dryer exhaust vent is 4″ (min); to get comparable air velocities you would have to increase the cleansing fan power by a factor of 6 or 7. The leaf blower also benefits from a very short smooth duct which will not be the case for many dryer installs. More duct (particularly elbows and rough sections) means more friction which means even more fan power to achieve a cleansing velocity. My arbitrary guess is that you will need 15x the power of a consumer leaf blower with the attendant increase in cost. In order to maintain the dryer efficiency rating, I highly doubt that the cleansing fan would be capable of double duty, i.e. a self-cleaning dryer would require two fans, one for normal operation and one for duct cleaning.
In many (perhaps most) cases, a self cleaning dryer will be installed in an existing house with existing exhaust duct. It is not reasonable to assume that all existing ductwork is installed to a standard that will handle the significant increase in pressure that a cleansing fan will produce. If there are any friction fitted joints in the system, they would probably separate if exposed to a cleansing velocity, perhaps in a concealed space that would result in a very real safety problem. Unfortunately, I think there would have to be some sort of testing and certification system to verify that dryer ducts were capable of handling high pressure exhaust. Commercial laundry installations often get a booster fan which allows you to exhaust individual dryers with a common exhaust duct. Perhaps this idea could be adapted to a residential setting, having a booster fan professionally installed independently from the dryer, with the installation requiring an inspection of the ductwork in cases where existing ducts are to be reused. This has the benefit of permitting all dryers to be self cleaning instead of the disgustingly expensive models to which the manufacturers will choose to add this feature.
All of the above, including your original idea, is a band aid for the real problem, the fact that dryers are poorly designed. I have never heard of a dryer with a variable speed fan that reduces air volume when the load permits. None of them have a heat reclaim function that would put the heat (but not moisture) in your house during the heating season. Every dryer I have ever seen has the same low performance lint filter and is capable of being operated without the filter in place. Every dryer I have ever seen requires the filter to be manually cleaned, with no reminder when it is full or lockouts when air volume is impeded. The high end clothes dryers currently available rival the technology that was used for the first lunar landing, but I doubt that any of them appreciably improve efficiency or safety. It is the way of all consumer goods, nice paint but don’t look too hard behind the curtain.
michigantelephone said
lgaetz, first of all, I am not a patent troll. I wouldn’t have a clue how to file a patent and from what I’ve heard it’s a complicated and expensive process, plus you have to deal with lawyers! None of which is the least bit appealing to me.
Besides, I honestly feel our patent system is totally broken. It’s based on a false premise (that ideas are the same thing as property) and in my opinion it’s the single biggest thing that’s retarding scientific progress today. Ask yourself why we don’t have flying cars yet, and the answer is most likely “patents and lawyers” (of course there’s also the alternative thought that shadowy government types are keeping the anti-gravity technology squirreled away and won’t let us have it, but I won’t go there).
Your other thoughts are all quite valid and especially your final paragraph. Really, this is a problem that should be solved at the appliance end. If the government would simply set a standard for how much lint a clothes dryer could allow to escape into the exhaust, maybe appliance manufacturers could be convinced to attack the problem. Really, there are two issues here — an excessive lint buildup can cause fires, although I doubt that’s high on the list of causes of house fires, and the fact that there is poor energy efficiency when there is too much lint buildup. The energy efficiency problem is compounded by the fact that the warm air is vented to the outside during the winter months, when it could be used to help heat the home.
Thing is, if we didn’t have the whole concept of patents I’ll bet a lot of companies would be working on these problems and trying to solve them. But nowadays everybody’s afraid that if they try to invent anything new, some patent troll will crawl out of the sewer and try to take the fruits of their efforts. That’s one reason so many things (and especially home appliances) haven’t changed all that much in the past 50 years or so. In fact, I think some of today’s models of appliances (particularly refrigerators) aren’t nearly as reliable as their 50 year old counterparts were. There are probably refrigerators built in 1962 that still work today, but I highly doubt that any refrigerator built in 2012 will still be working in 2062!
nick digger said
Another clothesline drawback: the clean, fresh scent of smog.