r/preppers • u/Kitso_258 • May 30 '21

Advice and Tips Clean out your dryer vents

If your living situation allows you to have your own dedicated washer/dryer within your home-space, clean out your dryer vent. Unscrew the lint trap holder and vaccuum out the stuff stuck to the sides. You can get a lint duct brush and mostly clean the ducts yourself, or if it's bad/out of reach, hire a professional. This is especially important if you've got pets - my dryer was FULL of pet hair.

Why is this important? Several reasons:

1, new appliances are in short supply right now. Take care of the one you've got.
2, new appliances cost money, see above.
3, it'll increase the efficiency of your dryer and use less electricity.

But the most important reason is that this is a HUGE fire risk. Lint = tinder, and all it takes is one spark in the wrong place to cause the lint to combust. And by spark, as everyone else has pointed out, it could just be the dryer heating element doing it's thing.

Little things like this... make our lives just a little bit better and safer.

Edit: Didn't expect this to blow up. If you wish to save the lint for future fire starter, then save away. My household produces SO MUCH of the crap that I don't ever worry about saving it for the long term...

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66

u/[deleted] May 30 '21 edited Sep 04 '21

[deleted]

38

u/Listens_To_Colors May 30 '21

Old cardboard egg cartons are great. Put lint and wax in the cups and you can cut them out as needed.

25

u/syrieus1 May 30 '21

I use toilet paper rolls

7

u/[deleted] May 30 '21 edited Jun 13 '21

[deleted]

8

u/redripetomato1134 May 30 '21

Yes. And everytime you wash clothes made of synthetic fibers, microplastics get washed into the sewer (ultimately the ocean).

2

u/[deleted] May 31 '21

I wonder if it's worse to throw the lint away to go into the ocean as microplastics or use it as a fire starter and burn the polyester/synthetic fibers into the atmosphere?

0

u/redripetomato1134 Jun 03 '21

I think ultimately it should come down to not buying synthetic clothes. Use what you have until rags but replace with natural fibers. There's a lot of over lap with microplastics>buy for life>anti-consumerism>zero waste>financial stability concerns.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '21

I agree with what you're saying but that didn't answer my question lol. Cause as of right now I've got a whole lot of synthetic fiber lint + would like to know if using it as a fire starter would be worse than throwing it away.

1

u/redripetomato1134 Jun 04 '21

I'm not sure. I guess you'd have to see what kind of pollution comes off it and weigh against the hazards to marine wildlife. It would be interesting to see an analysis of this. That's the problem here-- no perfect answers that tie everything up with a nice little bow.