Neglecting the regular cleaning of your dryer vents isn’t an innocent oversight – it’s actually quite dangerous, running the risk of dangerous fires inside your home. In this blog entry, the Charleston dryer vent cleaning professionals here at 843 Appliance Repair will detail the main reasons it’s incredibly serious to regularly clean lint draps and dryer vents in order to avoid the risk of dryer fires.
Cleaning Lint Traps After Laundry
Make sure to clean out lint traps after every load of laundry. It might be as easy as sliding out a lint trap and knocking it off the wire mesh – but if the wire mesh is clogged with dryer sheet residue, use a mixture of soap, warm water, and a bristled brush to remove the dryer sheet / fabric softener build up trapped inside the screen.
Regularly Cleaning Dryer Vents
While lint traps generally do a good job of blocking lint from entering your dryer vent, it’s easy for lint to move through this and get stuck inside the vent. We recommend hiring a professional to remove dust, lint, and other built up particulates that rapidly build up inside dryer vent systems. 843 Appliance Repair will use specialized tools like extendable brushes and vacuum attachments to access parts of your dryer vent system that are otherwise hard to reach.
Additional Dryer Safety Tips
- Don’t EVER put any clothing or fabric that has been soaked in cooking oil, motor oil, gasoline, lighter fluid, or any other type of flammable liquid into your dryers. This includes if they have been washed – no matter how many times they have been washed.
- Never run your dryer while it is unattended and if nobody is in the house.
- Always make sure that all flammable materials and liquid like lighters, firestarters, lint, paper, or even piles of dry clothing in laundry bins are kept far away from your dryer – even if you just finished dyeing a load of laundry and placed it into a clean bin. This is to reduce the risk of potential fires. After all, it’s always better to be safe than to be sorry.