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Originally Posted by NotGolfer
I've scrolled through several threads trying to find recommendations for a company or handyman who will come and clean out our dryer vent. Can anyone here help? Also would like to know a price range and contact info as well. I checked my NextDoor as well as the phone book and only came up with Jonathan's in Wildwood. If anyone has had them would you recommend them??
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I don’t know about your house, but in my house, the dryer vent pipe is metal and goes straight up the wall, through the attic, and onto the roof. It’s difficult for lint to catch on it, unlike a long, flexible plastic dryer hose that snakes through an attic and comes out of a wall twenty feet away. I empty the lint trap after every dryer load. I assume that you do, too.
Have you noticed that it is taking longer for your clothes to dry than it used to, or that they used to get dry at one setting, but now they don’t? Probably not.
If you have a metal vent pipe with a clear run, if you clean your link trap faithfully, and if your dryer is working normally, you really don’t need your dryer vent pipe cleaned, especially if you don’t use the hot setting on your dryer (I never do—it’s hard on the clothes). How is it going to catch on fire if the maximum air temperature is nowhere near the temperature needed for combustion? Companies are happy to clean the pipe for you, but you are wasting your money. Dryer lint traps these days tend to be very effective.
As for cleaning your heating and air conditioning pipes, that is also really unnecessary so long as you replace the air filter a couple times a year, especially if it’s a high quality filter. The filter catches nearly everything. If your HVAC system is like mine, here is what you have. There is a big return air grille in your living room near the garage. That sucks air down a big rectangular foil-covered fiberglass board duct about eight feet to the air filter, where almost any dust is filtered out. You would need several inches of dust on those duct walls to impede the air flow, and that is not going to happen.
After being filtered, the dust-free air is sent by fan back up a similar fiberglass board duct into the attic, where it is distributed into several round flexible pipes with wire springs inside to keep them from collapsing. These have plastic walls on both the inside and the outside and an inch of fiberglass in between the layers of plastic. Even if there WERE dust in that air, it isn’t going to easily stick to the plastic.
Thus, having your HVAC system pipes cleaned is really money down the drain. The companies will happily take your money, but it is a triumph of advertising over necessity. There is also some danger that vacuuming out the rectangular fiberglass board pipes can loosen fiberglass on the walls of that pipe and allow it to float through the ducts and into the air and then into your lungs. (This fiberglass board is made from a mixture of fiberglass and glue with thin foil on the outside. The inside is bare fiberglass. Rubbing it can break off pieces of this glass fiber. Your attic is filled with these glass fibers, and this fiberglass dust is quite unhealthy.