How To Clean Your Dryer Vent Duct - Step By Step - It's Super Simple!

[Music] hey everybody in this video i'm going to show you how to clean your dryer duct this is a job that is neglected by most homeowners and they don't realize that it's actually a little bit of a fire hazard all of the lint from your dryer can build up on the inner walls of that duct all the way from the dryer to the outside of the house and when that hot hot air comes out of your dryer it can cause a fire so in this video i'm going to show you the proper way to get it completely clean and let's get started now the first thing to mention of course is that your dryer has a lint trap in it that is designed to catch a lot of that lint before it gets into your ductwork so you should make sure you clean that after every single load we just did some laundry today and you can see our lint trap is very clean because we clean it every time we do laundry if you don't clean yours out after every load you might want to go and check it and just see how loaded up with lint it is keep that thing clean it's really important now i'm going to be using this kit that i found on amazon i'll leave a link down in the description below and i like this particular kit because it comes with this adapter that you can use to connect to your shop vac while you do the cleaning and this makes it much cleaner and easier to not make a huge mess while you're doing this without this attachment you wind up pulling the lint out into your laundry room or out into the side or backyard of your home and it is kind of a big mess so this little adapter makes this kit worth it to me however you can do this with any of the kits that are commonly available for example here's a pretty inexpensive one from home depot it costs around 20 bucks and it just comes with the rods and the cleaning brush it's a really basic kit but if you're on a strict budget this will get the job done let's briefly go over the items that come in the kit that i'll be using today it comes with this instruction manual and a brush you can use for cleaning out your dryer or if you've got small vents for cleaning those it comes with the brush itself that you'll use for cleaning the vents and then it comes with a couple of different adapters that are used for specific situations that i'm not going to cover in this video they're in the instructions though it also has a clog removal tool in case your vents are completely clogged up and an adapter for putting the rods onto your drill and then it comes with an assortment of rods now the regular kit i believe only comes with four so it will only go for 12 feet long i purchased an additional extension kit so i can go a full 24 feet now along with this kit you're going to need a few other things you'll need a drill to use to attach those rods to and you might need some things like a screwdriver a pair of pliers to disconnect some of the duct work but it's all fairly basic simple hand tools i'll leave links to real simple ones down in the description for anything that you see me use in the video once you've got all your tools gathered the next thing is to determine if you have a gas or an electric dryer electric is far more common but there are some gas dryers out there if you have a gas dryer turn off the gas supply for it before you move the dryer or disconnect anything if you have an electric dryer like this one then you'll just need to move it out of the way so you can access the rear of the dryer and unplug the power very first now once you pull the dryer out from the wall a little bit you'll see two things you've got a big power outlet and the duct itself and we're going to disconnect both of those things you might have to be a little bit of a spider-man to get back there but those are what you have to disconnect start with the power so this snake kind of duct here is going to need to be removed from the smooth duct which is built into the house right down here and they're usually clamped together with a band clamp that has a screw that you use to release it right there so the hardest part about this job is the cramped quarters getting these ducts disconnected is not very difficult you just loosen that band clamp and then it should slide right off the end so this one's fairly clean as you can see looking down here there's definitely some lint on the sides and some balls of lints beginning to kind of cling and kind of get stuck to stuff but all in all there's not all that much lint that's gathered up in here yet but it is still plenty dirty so we'll go ahead and get it clean as a comparison here's one that i did at my brother's house some months ago and as you can see his had a lot more lint that was caked on to the inside walls of his ducting now this lint will kind of build on itself so as soon as it starts to gather it will gather much more quickly and you'll wind up getting these to the point where they can actually close off completely and really restrict the airflow of your dryer it'll take a lot longer for your clothes to dry and it will become a fire hazard so this is an example of a pretty dirty duct although the one i'll be cleaning in this video is not that bad so this is the flexible duct that comes from the back of the dryer to the house and you want to make sure that this doesn't have any serious damage this has a little kink in it but it's not really all that bad you can kind of bend these back just a little bit just try and get it to be as round as possible this one i'm not going to bother replacing because it's in pretty good shape if you have any holes or really big compression areas where it gets really really thin you definitely want to replace that though now make sure you know exactly where your dryer exhaust port is on your house if you don't know where it is an easy way to find it is to turn on your dryer and then walk around your house and listen for and try and smell that fabric softener smell and you should be able to quickly locate that port now this one unfortunately is right next to their air conditioning condenser and that's unfortunate because as the lint is blown out of this it gets sucked right into your condenser so if yours is set up like this you should check out the video i did of all about how to clean out your air conditioning condenser coils i'll leave a link above my head here but once you've located this if it's easy to remove you should go ahead and take it off so that you can clean in from the from this end more effectively in this case i'm going to leave it on here because it's attached to a vent that goes down to the crawl space and there's other stuff going on with this vent so i'm gonna leave this one attached but if yours is easy to remove you should take it off during this cleaning process now keep in mind if you have a little bit of a hard time discovering exactly where your dryer vents on the outside of your house it might be up on your roof this kind of surprised me it's the first house i've ever found that actually had it on the roof but this is the way that my house is and it's kind of a good thing that they did it because if they'd run it straight out of the house from where the laundry room is located it would have been right next to my air conditioning condenser just like i showed in the prior example so i'm glad it's up on the roof although it makes cleaning it a little bit more difficult if you're not comfortable getting up on your roof then skip this step you can clean pretty effectively all the way up to this exhaust port but if you are comfortable getting up on the roof it's a good idea to get up there and disassemble it as much as you can and remove any of the built up lint and stuff that's going to be stuck in that vent as you can see they can get pretty nasty so this kit comes with these really flexible rods and these are going to make it so that we can get around all the twists and bends of the duct work to get from this part where it starts all the way to the outside of the house so the first step when we're ready to start cleaning is to attach our brush to the threaded end of this rod now if you got a different kit of course your assembly may be a little bit different but ours comes with these brushes that thread on to the end and then it has a little spot right here for a set screw so this set screw goes on with a little allen wrench and this just makes sure that this is not going to come unthreaded inside your vent because you can imagine trying to get this thing back out if it came disconnected from the rod would be kind of impossible at the other end of this rod there's this little adapter for your drill you'll go ahead and screw that in so that you are clamping your drill onto the adapter rather than onto the end of the rod so this also comes with this little vacuum adapter it has two holes in it this one is where we're going to attach a shop vac and this is the hole that the rods are going to go through now one important thing to keep in mind is you can't put this on the duct first because then the rod isn't going to fit through it so instead feed the rod through from the back side first now you can put this onto the duct and attach your shop vac and start cleaning okay with that rod through the adapter on the small hole go ahead and fish your brush a little ways into the duct and then the adapter can fit right on top and it should fit right down into the duct like that next we're going to grab our shop vac and we'll just put its hose right down into the duct adapter just like that and with this setup we are now ready to start cleaning the ducts okay then you just attach your drill to the end of this rod make sure it's nice and tight turn on your shop vac and then i'm going to slowly as i spin the drill in a clockwise direction that's really important make sure you spin it in a clockwise direction like you're screwing a screw in if you put your drill in reverse what happens is it will just unscrew the things that have been connected you can unscrew rods you can unscrew the head you can leave things down in the duct it's a bad time so leave your drill in forward or clockwise for this entire process next we'll turn on the shopvac with the drilling forward we'll then very slowly begin to move the brush in and out of the duct going a little deeper with each stroke until this entire first rod is into the duct at that point we'll then attach the next rod and do the same process over and over and over again until the duct is completely clean and the brush is bumping up against or has exited the vent on the outside of the house now one tip that's really important to keep in mind here as you're adding each of these segments of the rod it's a great idea to tape each of these joints i'm just going to use some electrical tape on these and that's because in case you ever accidentally put your drill in reverse you don't want these things to come unscrewed while they're in your vent getting them back out can be very very difficult to do so i just use some electrical tape to make sure that they're not going to come apart now electrical tape can be a little bit difficult to take back off so i like to fold over the end to leave a little tab to pull on it makes it a lot easier to take these things off as you're pulling the rods back out after you're done cleaning also as you add another rod it's a good idea to stabilize it with your other hand fairly close to the entrance of the vent you can see there's quite a lot of length there and if you just start spinning the drill with the rod really long it can actually twist over on itself and fold up and bend like a pretzel ask me how i know so it's a good idea to use your hand to help guide it so that it doesn't do that so again just tape each joint and then leave yourself a little tab of tape so that it's easy to pull it back off when you're removing the rods from the vent now here's some footage from a borescope that i used down in the vent to see exactly what the cleaning process looks like you can see as the brush spins around it scrapes all that lint off the inside walls of the duct and it really does a really good job having that shop vac there to help suck out the lint as it's loosened from the walls really makes this job much much easier and as you can see once you've done a couple of passes the vents really do become very very clean it does a great job when you start to feel some resistance then go out and check to see if you are at the end or if you've come completely out you may have hit a kink that's particularly tight but don't force it you don't want to try and get this thing all tangled up in your ductwork so when you start to feel some resistance it's time to check to see if you've hit the vent outlet at the outside of the house if you happen to have one of these vents that you can't easily remove bear in mind that there's a little flapper door inside there and when you try and pull this back in it might get stuck on that flapper door so you have to come out and reach up underneath there and hold that flapper door up out of the way and then feed the brush back in so you can pull the brush and all those rods back out speaking of removing the rods here's what that process looks like keeping your drill running in the forward direction pull it out of the vent and then remove the drill from the end of the rods there and then using that little tab of tape that you left yourself you can really easily remove that tape that help make sure that those rods don't come apart then you can take off that length of rod and reattach the drill lather rinse and repeat and just go slow and take your time there's no rush for doing any of this and all of the rods should come out really easily this way and leave you with nice clean ducts so here's another example from another house that i helped on and you can see just how easy it is to remove the tape with that little tab that i left myself and how easily these rods unscrew from each other and are able to come back out of the vent as i'm finishing this job so when you removed all but the very last rod that has the brush attached to it go ahead and pull that out to the point that you can feel it bumping up against the little vent adapter then shake it off some so you get any lint that was stuck to it to get sucked up by the vacuum and then you can pull the whole adapter and vacuum and everything completely off your vent all at once then just disassemble everything and you're finished with cleaning the ducts inside the house so here's the vent that i just finished cleaning you can see how much cleaner it is to remind you how dirty it was when we started this is what it looked like beforehand and i mentioned at the beginning it wasn't that dirty but as you can see it really did have quite a bit of lint all caked up there it looks great now though so with the duct in the house finished up now we need to clean the duct that goes from the dryer to the house don't forget this step because there's going to be lint caked up in there as well if you've got one of these flexible vents try and flatten it out and straighten it out as much as you can and then the process for cleaning it is exactly the same as cleaning the vents in the house just be really careful these vents can be fragile and the brush can damage them especially if you have one of those plastic ones so just be gentle be very careful and once you finish cleaning that it's a good idea to remove it from the dryer so you can clean inside the dryer as well so here we are looking into the back of the dryer and you can see the vent inside the dryer is just a long tube and goes straight back there so we'll clean that as well so the little vent adapter that i have for the shop vac doesn't fit on the dryer very well so i skipped that just held the shop vac hose in there with my hand kind of with the back of my hand there and then just use my fingertips to guide the rod as i did the cleaning on the dryer vent with everything all cleaned up now it's time to reassemble i'm going to start by putting the flexible hose back onto the back of the dryer make sure when you're putting these flexible hoses back on that you seat them completely over the flange that's sticking out and then make sure you tighten the band clamp down enough to really lock it in place so it doesn't come out when you're putting the dryer back in place with the flexible hose reconnected to the dryer i can now move the dryer back close to where it was originally but i gotta leave myself enough space to still crawl back there and reconnect the flexible hose to the house again making sure it's seated all the way onto the ductwork coming out of the house and that i tighten down that band clamp enough that make sure it's not going to come back off okay with the duct reconnected we can plug the power back in if your dryer uses gas now is the time to make sure that your natural gas lines are reconnected and the supply is turned back on with everything reconnected now it's time to start up the dryer and make sure that it starts to get warm and that it is venting properly outside the house in this case i went back out and moved the rocks around to make sure that there was plenty of room and that there was nothing obstructing the bottom part of that vent all right and with that this job is finished as you can see it's not a very difficult job to do the hardest part is probably the moving around for the washer and dryer and kind of working in the tight spot that's not very comfortable but it's an easy job to get done and it's a really important one to do hey if you've enjoyed this video or learned a little something you can let me know with a thumbs up down below and if you'd like to see more content like this of course you can think about subscribing but there's no pressure there of course and as always thank you very much for [Music] watching [Music] you

Channel: AmplifyDIY

Views: 895,457

Rating: 4.9337754 out of 5

Keywords: dryer vent, dryer duct, clean dryer vent, clean dryer duct, how to clean dryer vent, how to clean dryer duct, dryer vent clogged, dryer vent lint, lint removal, dryer vent cleaning, dryer vent cleaning kit, dryer vent cleaning brush, dryer duct cleaning, dryer duct cleaning kit, linteater, linteater kit, linteater dryer vent cleaner, how to clean dryer vent with vacuum, how to clean dryer vent hose, linteater vent cleaning kit, dryer vent cleaning diy, clean dryer vent DIY

Id: GLZSqhUoF_g

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020