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...

550 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

127 comments sorted by

View all comments

235

u/throwAwayWd73 May 30 '21

Empty the lint trap after EVERY SINGLE LOAD

My wife is bad about that one. The build up after even two loads isn't good.

24

u/thebrokenbox May 30 '21

I have to tell my wife all the time to do it because when I help with the laundry I always notice that she’s let it go a few loads without doing it.

11

u/[deleted] May 30 '21

It's weird because my wife is a stickler for other kinds of maintenance, but not dryer lint.