When we lived at the condo, the association scheduled dryer vent cleaning every two or three years. Our current house was built in 1990, and after seeing how some other maintenance was done, I wondered if they’d ever taken care of the dryer vents. Left untouched, it will reduce your dryer efficiency or even provide a great starting point for a fire.
I didn’t love the idea of paying someone ~$100 to do this so I picked up a $30 kit from Amazon. There are a few ways to configure it,and since I didn’t know how dirty ours was, I chose to be thorough. I started by pulling the dryer out and using the included adapter to hook the shop vac up to the inside end of the dryer vent. I flipped it on in vacuum mode and headed outside with my drill and the rest of the kit. I’m sure you get the idea so I’ll skip the rest of the details, but basically I went back and forth with the brush from the inside and the outside and eventually ended up with a huge pile of lint. The pipe is only about 14 feet long, but I there was easily 2-3 gallons worth of lint.
The process liberated some Lego pieces that must have been in there for a very long time. The previous owners had five girls and the original owners had five boys. I’ll be sexist and assume the Legos came from the boys which means it has been too long since this was done. But now that I have a kit and know how easy this is, I’ll put it on the regular maintenance schedule. Make sure you get your house cleaned out too!