The short answer is yes, and the longer answer is that dryer vents that are clogged with lint are a fire hazard. Thousands of house fires every year are due to a clogged dryer vent.
A clean dryer vent can easily direct all of the warm moist air away from the clothes, but when that same vent is clogged with lint and other debris, it takes longer to dry the same volume of clothes. Cleaning your dryer vent will restore the full drying capacity of your clothes dryer.
In a perfect world, your dryer vent would lead straight out the wall to the outside. Every time that your vent bends, it slows down the speed of the air and can help to trap lint in that bend. The more bends, the more likely that your vent will trap lint faster, and that leads to the need to clean out your vent more frequently.
No, because of the heat generated by your dryer, a plastic tube will slowly melt and deform over time. Instead, a metal dryer vent is the right solution for your ducting and joining metal tubes with metal tape as well for a good seal.
A typical recommendation is to have your dryer vent cleaned every 1-3 years. If you have a short vent pipe, you will not need it to be cleaned as often; vent pipes that are longer than 5 feet should be cleaned more often.
You should notice right away on your next load of laundry that your dryer is drying clothes like it should in a single cycle. You will likely also notice that the room your dryer is in will not be as warm, and your dryer will not be as hot to the touch. Your dryer will also operate as it should for a longer life.
Yes, we have many commercial clients that rely on our dryer vent cleaning service on a routine basis. Hospitals, hotels, laundromats, apartment buildings, and other commercial buildings all have us clean their dryer vents.
While every dryer vent is slightly different, a typical dryer vent cleaning can take between 30 minutes and an hour and a half. Once our technician has taken a look at your dryer vent, we will provide you with an estimate of time.
Not, we will leave your space as clean or cleaner than when we arrived. Because we vacuum up what we remove from the dryer vent, you will not have to do any further cleaning after we leave.
Many signs indicate you likely need to have your dryer vent cleaned. These include: running your dryer for more than 1 cycle to dry clothes; the room being hotter than normal while the dryer is working; lint coming out of your exhaust vent outside; dryer feeling hotter to the touch than normal; a burning smell when running the dryer.