Can you clean a dryer vent with a leaf blower?
In the Florida winter when leaves covers your yard, a leaf blower is one of the most useful and back saving tools you can use. You also use the leaf blower to clean up your driveway and walkways after mowing the lawn. The way we see it is the leaf blower has many functions, but cleaning a dryer vent with a leaf blower in Florida is not a good idea.
Leaf blowers are tools that can be used for a number of tasks they aren’t designed for, from heating up fires, to drying cars. One common misuse of a leaf blower is trying to use it to blow lint from clothes dryer vents. It may work for some people, but in most cases, it causes more problems.
Using a leaf blower to try and remove lint from a dryer vent will more than likely just compact the lint into a ball of lint somewhere in the dryer vent or at the vent at the roof. This will completely clog the dryer vent from exhausting anything. Now you’re unable to remove the blockage yourself you have to hire a professional dryer vent cleaning company. The dryer vent professional may charge you more to dislodge the compact lint because it is much harder to remove. We recommend cleaning the dryer vent yearly and avoid using a leaf blower if you choose to not call a professional to have the service performed. There are other tools that are inexpensive and designed for cleaning the dryer vent yourself.
What is the lint in a dryer vent?
Before we look at how to remove lint from a dryer vent, let’s think about what lint is and where it comes from. Lint is a collection of tiny fibers from our linen that are detached during the washing and drying process.
When you wash your clothes, these fibers are removed from your clothes by the contact of the washing process. Some of the lint remains stuck to your clothes in the washer because your clothes are still wet.
During the drying process, lint is removed from your clothes. This is a normal part of the process, and dryers have built in lint screens that catch some of the lint. The lint that makes it through the lint screen goes into your dryer vent and sticks to the walls. Over time the lint collects and reduces the amount of air able to exhaust through the dryer vent causing issues with drying and causing wear on your drying machine.
Why do you need to remove lint from your dryer vent?
There are many important reasons why you should remove lint annually from your dryer vent. A buildup of lint will reduce the airflow through your dryer vent, which means clothes take longer to dry and your dryer machine has to work harder to dry the linen.
Lint in the vent can also create mildew and mold. When the dryer vent is clogged with lint there is nowhere for the moisture being removed from the clothes to be exhausted so it will usually be trapped inside of the dryer vent adapter.
The most important reason is a dryer vent that cannot properly exhaust the hot moist gasses can become a fire hazard. In fact, it is thought that around 16,000 house fires each year in the US are caused by lint catching fire. There are many reasons you should regularly clean your homes dryer vent.
