Why is my dryer taking so long to dry my clothes?

If you found this blog post, I can definitively tell you that it is not normal for a load of towels to take two hours to dry. Nor should your load of delicates take an hour to dry.

If you find that your dryer’s efficiency has gone WAY down, it might be time to clean your dryer vent.

Allow me to take you on a little journey here…(this is my own laundry’s journey…not anyone else’s. Also it is very simplified. Most technicians will roll their eyes at my simplification.)

First, I put a gigantic load of laundry into the dryer. It is too much laundry to dry at one time, but I’m a mom and time is precious.

Next, I turn on the dryer and it begins to dry my clothes. In order to dry the clothes, the dryer pushes air into the machine. The air that the machine is pushing into the drum gets wet from wet laundry and it needs to be able to escape the machine. If the wet air cannot escape the dryer, essentially, we are creating a sauna. If we create a sauna, the dryer will keep the clothes wet.

The wet air gets pushed through the lint trap. The lint trap catches much of the fibers that tumble off my clothes.

Here’s a picture of a lint trap after a load of laundry. People falsely assume, however, that this lint trap captures all of the escaped clothing fiber. Nope! These teeny tiny fibers manage to wiggle their way out of the lint trap’s grasp into the hose that is supposed to let the sticky wet air escape from the dryer.

As the clothes dry, the sticky wet air turns into dry warm air and even very hot air moving through the tube. That dry air also drys out the lint fibers that managed to escape. This is the point when a possible fire hazard presents itself. In the right circumstances, the hot air can catch dry lint fibers on fire, causing a home fire.

In the best case scenario, the escaped lint just builds up on the inside of the tube. Kind of like a clogged artery, the dryer vent ends up with a smaller diameter to push the air through to escape. Where the heart has to push harder to keep the blood flowing, the dryer has to work harder to keep the air moving out of the dryer.

Here is a picture of the amount of lint that managed to escape a dryer vent that we cleaned. Imagine how much lint was stuck in the vent!

At some point in time, the dryer vent gets so clogged that the hot air doesn’t escape at all. Sometimes the lint inside the vent doesn’t dry either. This is the point that I notice that my dryer doesn’t work at all.

Rather than call an appliance repair company, I try starting with a dryer vent cleaning company. This could end up saving a lot of money. Not only will I avoid the cost of a repair evaluation, but also I can save some money on my electric bill since my dryer won’t be working as hard to do its job.

Are you curious about the dryer vent cleaning process? Click here for information about what to expect during an appointment.