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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u/SumthingBrewing May 30 '21

My LG dryer has a nice feature where it senses a clogged vent so it flashes an error code and ceases to work. This happened to me a few weeks ago. Sure enough, it was very clogged. So I did the ol’ leaf blower trick and it’s good as new now. This is where having an electric leaf blower was a definite plus since our dryer is inside our house (not in the garage).

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u/[deleted] May 30 '21

LG d80 error! forced me to replace the flex vent with rigid vent and hard 90 joints, hasn't triggered since, it literally goes right out the wall behind it, very short distance. Love when you check the LG website, "Q: Why not make the blower stronger?!" Buddy has the same issue.

Was surprised from the very hot blower it goes into the drum, thru the lint trap, and is a straight pipe out the back. Thought there was a mid stage for some reason. Also had some lint burning at the blower screen, not sure how it got it there. hella long time to pull it out with a thin wire, so used a grill lighter to burn it out.

still like the over computerized LG but more things to break.