How often should a dryer vent be cleaned?
How often should a dryer vent be cleaned?
Once a year for a typical household. Twice a year if you run more than about five loads a week, dry pet bedding, or have a duct run longer than 25 feet.
That is the short answer. The longer one is that general national advice tends to undercount what Cape houses need, for reasons that have nothing to do with how much laundry you do.
What actually drives the interval
Lint escapes the trap on every load and settles in the duct. How fast it builds up depends on how much air is moving through, how far it has to travel, and how many opportunities it has to catch on something along the way.
- Loads per week — more air through the duct means more lint left behind in it.
- Run length — a long duct has more surface for lint to settle on and less airflow at the far end to carry it out.
- What the duct is made of — corrugated flex hose catches lint on every ridge; smooth rigid metal does not.
- Bends — every elbow is a place where airflow slows and lint drops.
- Pet bedding and heavy fabrics, which shed far more than clothing does.
Why Cape Cod is different
Cape houses make it worse than average in four specific ways. Duct runs to an exterior wall are long. Salt air works on the exterior hood until the flap stops moving freely. Crawlspaces are full of flex hose that was never meant to go there. And vents that birds and rodents treat as shelter are common enough here that our gallery has a category for what comes out of them.
A run over 25 feet is common on the Cape and adds $40 to a clean — worth knowing when you are budgeting for an annual visit rather than meeting it as a surprise on the day.
Rentals and turnovers
A summer rental is a different problem from a family home. The dryer may sit unused for months and then run several loads a day for eight weeks, often with towels and bedding, and often with nobody in the house who would notice a cycle taking twice as long.
For those, timing the clean to the start of the season is worth more than any fixed calendar date.
Last reviewed Sunday, August 30.
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