What I Learned Today About The Laundry.

I’ll warn you in advance ~ this is not a sexy story.

I’ve been having trouble with my laundry lately – well for one I haven’t really done it – too busy.  I’ve gathered enough clothing, sheets and towels that I can literally amass an impressive pile before I actually run out of things and have to start a load.  That coupled with the fact that I’m not a housework buff (Monica on Friends would find me perplexing) makes the act of doing laundry a fairly infrequent happinstance.

The other issue is that my dryer – which is an LG Tramm (about 3 years old) has been taking longer and longer to dry the clothes.  It heats them quite efficiently, and last night it actually baked them dry over the span of 5 hours. Over the past few weeks now, thinking back, linens and quilts have been less fluffy feeling and towels have had a tendency to go sour fairly quickly.

I cleaned out the lint trap very thoroughly with a vacuum, and when that didn’t work stomped the floor a few times, then cursed the appliance.

This morning I made a trip to the basement – my least favorite place in this house (there are a lot of strange critters down there) – and checked out the exhaust duct.

It’s a flexible metal deally that comes down from the laundry room, and makes about a 20 degree decline across about 4 feet before it hits the vent to the outside.   I went down and poked at it – thinking it might be full of lint.  Surprisingly there was quite a weight there – so I unscrewed the clamp thing and placed a bucket underneath (you never know what is going to turn up around my place – bird’s nest, mouse nest, ect).  What came out surprised me – at least a gallon of linty water.

Turns out that a laundry exhaust duct designed like that in which there is a decline that meets cold air (the cold air causes the steam coming from the dryer to turn to liquid and catch in the pipe) and flexible duct that can sag between joists or whatever is holding it is a recipe for trouble.

The duct was totally blocked so that there was no way for the steam and excess lint to escape so it just accumulated.  Not only was this an extreme energy drain, but could easily have led to a dryer fire, or a bad electrical shock.  Also all that warm moisture hanging around sheets and towels can’t be a good thing.

As soon as I unplugged it (emptied it) ~ wella!  The quilts (above) that I’d been trying to finish came out warm and dry and fluffy ~ so it was definitely not an LG issue.

So the moral of the story is this – (1) if your dryer is taking forever to dry clothes, be sure to check the duct to make certain it’s not blocked – (2) try to situate your exhaust vent so that there are as few bends and turns as possible and try to point it up, not down.

Tagged as: cleaning, dryer, dryer vent, housekeeping, laundry