Dryer fires are far more common than most homeowners realize, and the dryer vent is often the root cause. In this episode, Jamie explains how lint buildup, restricted airflow, and improper vent materials create serious fire hazards inside the home.

Jamie shares practical guidance on proper dryer vent maintenance and material selection, helping you reduce risk, improve appliance performance, and protect your home through simple preventative steps.

Episode Highlights

1. Why dryer fires are more common than most homeowners realize
2. How lint buildup and poor airflow create serious fire hazards
3. The importance of proper dryer vent materials and installation
4. Simple maintenance tips to reduce risk and improve safety

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It started with the smell of something burning, and it was not the toaster and it wasn't the kid playing with a magnifying glass. It ended up coming from the dryer. Thank you for tuning in again to another episode of Thoughts from the Crawl Space.

Today we're going to talk about dryer fires. Or maybe we should. The dryer vent fire you never saw coming.

So I wanted to start this off just a little different today because this is a serious issue. A high percentage of house fires start from the dryer and more specifically because of the vent.

So we're going to talk today about some reasons why, what kind of dryer vent you should use, what you shouldn't use, and so you'll be more educated than when you started listening to this episode. Let's jump right in. So let's paint this picture. It's an ordinary laundry day. Laundry's going, you might smell something. What's going on?

You don't think much of it. Maybe somebody burning trash outside, maybe somebody's burning leaves outside, who knows what.

All of a sudden you notice smoke coming from the laundry room and then you realize, oh, we may have a problem here. Fire department shows up. Maybe they save you in the nick of time. Maybe you have your own fire extinguisher.

You save yourself from a fire, regardless, the shock, when you learn the cause is simply your dryer vent. So nothing. Nobody expects laundry to fight back, right? You throw it in there, it dries, you get it out. It's all fluffy and clean and beautiful.

But if you don't take the time to get serious about the dryer vent, to do regular, responsible homeowner maintenance on it, it can cause you big problems. Now, why do dryer vent fires happen?

One thing that's irritating to me is one of the bigger causes of dryer fires is the material used for dryer vents that can be bought almost anywhere. You can buy it at Lowe's, Menards, Hardware stores, Home Depot, wherever. And that is the plastic and the kind of aluminum accordion style vents.

And we'll touch on those in just a little bit. But the technical side of this, very simply is lint buildup is what's causing your problem.

Lint can be a great fire starter in Fact, enthusiasts that love outdoors and starting fires sometimes will use lint as tinder to help them start the fire. So if that tells you anything. So lint is basically tiny fluffy kindling.

It's highly flammable, so if you want to use it, great, just don't use it in your house. Use it, keep it stored for camping or whatever you need to start fire with. So that's one reason a fire happens is you have flammable material.

Number two is a crushed or kinked vent hose.

If you ever pulled your dryer out to clean behind it, then shoved it back against the wall and then double check to make sure you didn't crush the pipe back there, you could have, you could have cut off or severely restricted airflow and then you're not going to be getting the same kind of cooling. Your dryer can overheat and then that can lead to fire. Obviously those things are never good. Excessively long vent runs are a problem.

The further the lint must travel, the more gets stuck. And generally dryer manufacturers recommend no more than 25ft of, of run on a dryer vent of straight run.

So that's if it comes out of the dryer and there's no elbows and it goes all the way out. But we know that almost never happens. What we calculate within that 25ft is every elbow is 6ft.

Every 90 degree elbow accounts for 6ft and a 45 degree angle accounts for 3ft. So if you have four elbows in some way or another, getting outside that dryer vent probably can't be much longer than about 8 or 10ft.

And so those that can be problematic and then wrong materials. We talked about this a little bit ago, plastic or foil accordion vents.

I can accept this use for exhaust fans in bathrooms, but it's just simply a very poor material for dryer vents. Dryers should be rigid or semi rigid metal. There are some that look like they're kind of flexible. They do kind of pull apart.

But the accordion part themselves is really, really small. And it just kind of gives you more flexibility with it than a, a straight pipe would. Straight pipes ideal.

And you can use those for the bulk of the dryer vent. But maybe to get around a joist or you know, out of the dryer and up the wall, you'll need something that bends a little bit.

In that case you can use that type or you can use just a regular elbow that goes with straight pipe. So metal not going to burn.

Metal is not going to accumulate lint as quick as those accordion type filled Vents do so excessively long vent runs, wrong vent materials, and then poor airflow or a failing dryer. Dryers overheat when they're struggling to breathe. Have you cleaned around it lately?

Are there more socks behind there than they are in your kid's drawer? Those can all restrict airflow and cause problems. Pull your dryer out, clean under it, clean behind it, clean inside it.

Google on how to take your dryer door cover off and of course disconnect the power clean inside of it. Get all the stuff you might find.

That hundred dollar bill that you went missing, made count of your pocket, went through the dryer system, ended up beneath the dryer. So lack of cleaning is a big reason for, for fires. It really is it.

At the very least, it's going to restrict your dryer, make it work harder and raise your electric bill or gas bill. Now talking about vent material, especially, especially when you have a gas dryer. In other words, you're using natural gas or propane.

It could be to run the unit. You're having some exhaust come out, not just hot air and lint. And so in those cases, you definitely need to make sure that vent pipe is secure.

It's together, maybe the joints are taped just to make sure you don't have any seepage or leakage going on. So here are some warning signs that people ignore with their dryer vent or the fact that you have a problem, not just specifically with the vent.

Clothes taking longer to dry. If it used to take you 40 minutes to do an average load and now it takes an hour and 30, we got a problem. Check the dryer vent first.

The dryer feels unusually hot to the touch. If you go up to it, you can't hardly touch it. You got a problem. You need to shut that thing down before it gets any worse.

A burnt smell during or after drying. Hello. Burnt is not good. So that's just an indication of something going on.

If your head is pounding and you have a massive headache, that's a sign you got something wrong. Same with your dryer. If it's hot, if it smells, if it has a burnt odor to it, you got a problem. Visible lint around the exterior vent hood.

So if you go outside where it exits and you got lint out there, well, probably it's clogged throughout the whole vent and it's just starting to accumulate out there. In other words, lint won't even stay in anymore, it just blows right out. The flapper on the exterior vent is not opening.

So there's various kinds of vent flaps, you have the louvered ones, which are probably the most common. Then you have maybe just a round one. That's one big flap. And those are basically the only two types you see.

The ones, the big flap tends to get lint caught behind the hinge point on it, propping it open a little bit. And what that does is really is an avenue for birds and whatnot to get in there and create nesting material.

We've had this issue at least twice with our home, and it's in front of a big old. Some kind of evergreen shrub right in front of the. Of the vent. And birds hang out in there. And then in the winter, I guess they get lazy.

They want warmth. They pop in there, create their nest. Next thing you know, it takes an hour and a half to dry our load.

So you have to be very diligent about bird nesting in your event. Now, some folks you'll see, you'll create a box around it of wire mesh to keep birds out. There's pros and cons to that.

It'll keep birds out, but it also restricts airflow, and it may help clog the end up quicker and clogs the end up. It's effectively like having a bird in there. So just keep it clean is all I'm saying.

You can get a combination of moisture, snow and lint and ice, and next thing you know, you just got a big old lint sickle on the outside of your vent and stopping the airflow. So humidity buildup in the laundry room. This makes. This is going to make your dryer work harder.

Remember, that dryer is sensing how dry these clothes are. And so if you have a lot of humidity in that room, it affects that sensor. The dryer is going to say, oh, I got to keep going.

Got to keep going, and can create a bigger problem. So. And then just simply excess lint inside the dryer filter. You should.

And I'll repeat this, you should clean the lint filter between every single load. Remember I said the lint was flammable, right. Why would you leave that in there when you know it's flammable and you're starting a new load?

So get that lint out of here. So. So a couple of things we see on inspections. These are just some common problems we see. And we're not even doing any laundry. Right.

That would be an upcharge if you wanted us to do your laundry on an inspection. Not saying we'd rule it out forever, but at this point, we have not done that. So completely Clogged vent pipe.

If we open that outside flap and look in it, we can't see anything but lint. You got a big problem. A bird nest or a rodent nest. Birds and rodents have survival instincts. And dryers create heat.

If they want to stay warm, they're going to go where the heat is. That's why they're trying to get into your house any way possible. A dryer vent to the exterior is an opening into your house.

Oh, and by the way, don't vent your dryer into the garage or into the attic or into the crawl space or basement. Drier air. It sounds crazy, but dryer air has a lot of moisture in it because the dryer unit itself is getting the moisture out.

Well, if it goes out, it needs to literally go outside. Not into the attic, not the crawl space, not in the garage. The garage. It can even create a fire hazard. You're shooting lint out there.

You got cars starting up, so you got exhaust, you got excessive moisture. If you have a gas dryer, exhausting fumes out into the garage as well. So really bad idea.

Other things we see the foil or plastic ducting, we're going to call that out every time and recommend a rigid style vent. Missing or broken vent hood flapper. Just as something has not been maintained, the flappers are all missing.

They do get brittle and fall off from time to time. You need to go just pick up a new one and put it on vent pipe full of moisture or mold.

And then do I DIY vent jobs with multiple turns, tape and bad connections.

If you have multiple turns in your vent pipe, talking 90 degree elbows or worse, you're just not going to have a very efficient drying experience with that dryer. So when you move in, I would highly recommend completely changing out your vent pipe and starting over.

So how it starts, how the dryer fire starts, Just a quick breakdown. Airflow restrictions causes the dryer to run hotter.

Lint accumulates in the vent system, the dryer overheats, lint ignites, at least heats enough to smolder, and the fire spreads through the vent, the wall cavity or the laundry room. I had a rental house, we had renters and we had a dryer fire.

As far as I can tell, the vent pipe was clean, but for whatever reason, the dryer caught on fire. We had immense smoke damage throughout the house. Cost thousands of dollars to get it cleaned. Fortunately, we had insurance.

But this was a dryer that seemingly was functioning properly, wasn't maintained well. Hard to say the dryer vent was clean. But there could have been an accumulation right at the point where it goes into the dryer vent.

We don't know at this point, but certainly something that can happen quickly. And a routine chore that you do, one that you can even train your kids to do, can turn bad really quickly if you don't do this.

So here's some prevention tips in closing. Number one, Clean your dryer vent annually, maybe even more if you have larger families.

Especially as you get toward cold temperatures, birds are going to try to create nests in there. Use rigid or semi rigid metal only. Keep the vent run as short and straight as possible. Keep the elbows out. Clean the lint trap every single load.

Heard that, right? Every single load. Number six, ensure the exterior vent hood opens freely. 7. Check behind the dryer for crushed hoses or vents.

One thing on cleaning the lint, you can't just clean it out right where it exits.

It's not a terrible idea to hire a professional to come in with equipment that has extensions on it that can take kind of a cleaning brush all the way through your vent.

Another reason to have rigid vent pipe is when they take that brush down through there, it won't destroy it, which it will on an accordion style vent. So rigid pipe, get it professionally cleaned, replace damaged or old vents and know the age of your dryer.

Now I'm not saying replace your dryer just because it's old, but be alert to warning signs that there's a problem with takes longer, it's hot to the touch, smells funny when you're done. Those are all little clues that you need to pay attention to.

So if you have any questions about your dryer, the process of cleaning, finding somebody that can clean it, we'd be glad to help. Thanks for listening to this episode of Thoughts from the Crawl Space.

Please call Gold Key if you have any home inspection related needs or just any home needs and we give you some guidance on that. So thanks again and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you for listening.

This week you can catch up on the latest episode of the Thoughts from the Crawl Space podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. For more information about Gold Key Inspection services, go to goldkeyinspect.com.