Snake in the Dryer Vent

      No, not a real live snake.  Settle down.  No need to shiver and get the chills.

     It is a  sewer-cleaning snake. 

     The story goes back a few years.  (Hard to believe, but we are coming up on ten years of living in this house.)

     The washer and dryer are in the basement.  The dryer vent runs up inside a wall, takes a turn, or maybe two, and between floor and ceiling, heads to the outdoors.  The horizontal section of the metal vent pipe is at least twenty feet.

     Every year, as farm activities slow down, I think, “I’ll clean that dryer vent pipe this fall or winter.”  This spring, I really did go after the lint in that vent pipe.  I think a lot of house fires start when lint, highly flammable, builds up in the pipe and some malfunction of the dryer allows it to keep running and heating even after the clothes are dry.

      Under ordinary circumstances, the lint is so wet you couldn’t ignite it with a torch.  But when it is dry, it makes a good fire-starter.  Try using some to start the blaze in your fireplace or wood stove.

      Anyway, I moved the cabinet nestled between the washer and dryer.  I moved the dryer away from the wall so I could get to the flexible connection from dryer to vent pipe.  No easy task, since the dryer is "two-story." There was plenty of lint in the flexible pipe.  It was easy to use a rag to remove the lint from it.

     Now for the metal pipe disappearing into the basement wall.  A drain-cleaning sewer snake would be perfect, at least so I thought.  I tied a rag to the little coil spring on the tip of the snake and ran it into the pipe. 

      It was sort of successful.  I got a lot of lint out.  My idea was to run the snake all the way through the pipe, tie a rope to the end of the snake and pull it with the rope in tow back through the pipe.

     Problem:  the snake is only fifteen feet long.  It was then I calculated the length of the vent pipe.  It must be between twenty and thirty feet long.  Revise the plan.  I had to go from both directions, from the outside termination of the pipe as well as the from the dryer side. 

     If it was indeed thirty feet of pipe, the fifteen-foot snake should cover the entire length.  To gain access to the vent pipe from outside, I had to remove the metal, hooded flapper mechanism. Worthless flapper, I should add, because the flapper valve never closes after a little lint gets into the hinge side.   The idea is for the flapper to close when the dryer is not running.  Once the lint gets into its hinge, the flapper never closes.

     It took a little effort to get rid of the flapper assembly.  Screwed to the exterior wall and a rather tight fit, it came out reluctantly.  I ran the snake and rag as far into the pipe as I could from the outside.  I got some lint out, but it wasn’t satisfactory.  I needed a longer snake.

     I didn’t want to buy one, so I went to Home Depot where the only light snakes were electric powered ones that look like an electric drill attached to a sewer snake.  It was $30 for 4 hours to rent it.

     I had another snake at the farm.  No need to rent one.  I bought a plastic dryer vent termination assembly which is much more efficient than the metal one.  The plastic one has three little flappers that aren’t too badly affected  by the lint, and they are easy to clean if they do get stuck open.

      It was a bit of a problem to get the plastic one through the wall and connected to the metal pipe because the metal pipe had no support and sagged when I removed the old flapper assembly.  I got it in temporarily and resolved to finish the job after the next trip to the farm.

     All was well for a few cycles of the dryer.  But one day, the dryer ran and ran and ran.  I opened the door.  The clothes were still quite wet.  Hmmmm.  Did we need a new dryer?

    I went outside and discovered that there was virtually no air coming through the vent pipe when the dryer was running.  Back down the stairs, I pulled the flexible pipe off the metal vent pipe, and the warm wet air gushed out.  I left the dryer run with the hot air venting into the laundry room.  In about fifteen minutes, the clothes were dry.

     Conclusion:  nothing wrong with the dryer.   My cleaning attempt had had the opposite effect; it plugged up the vent pipe so that no air could get through it.

     I didn’t have a shop vac, but that was my first idea.  Stick a hose in there and see if I could remove any of the lint that way. 

     We do have a central vac in the garage that has never been hooked up.  It seems to have been used to vacuum vehicles and the garage floor once in a while.  It has a twenty-foot hose.  It wouldn’t reach the dryer vent.  I took the hoses from the central vac and hooked it to the Kenmore vac and ran it as far into the pipe as I could.

     It sort of worked.  The vacuum hose would grab a slug of lint and plug up.  I would pull the hose out, unplug it and repeat the operation.  I eventually had a trash bag full of lint.  And the dryer worked a little better, but the air flow wasn’t as robust as it should have been.

      I still needed something to go through the entire length of the vent pipe.  I had remembered to bring the other sewer snake from the farm by this time. Attempts to connect the two snakes together by sticking one in from the basement and the other into the outside opening were unsuccessful.

     And now, the problem.  I decided I should hook the two snakes together and try driving them in that way.  I should be able to get all the way through the vent pipe with the two hooked together.  You have probably already figure out what happened.

     My connection was a dismal failure.  I got one snake about twenty feet in, it got stuck.  When I tried to pull it back, my feeble connection broke and about five feet of the second snake came tumbling down out of the vertical section of vent pipe. 

      The other snake has taken up lodgings in the dryer vent pipe.  It remains.  Attempts to remove it from either end of the vent pipe have been unsuccessful.

     I returned to the vacuum cleaner.  This time, I ran the dryer on air flow—no heat--while I ran the vacuum hose into the vent as far as I could from the outside.  Using that and the sewer cleaner, I managed to remove a bushel, no exaggeration, of lint.

      When the vacuum came up empty, I ran the snake in there and snagged big chunks of sopping wet lint.  Not much danger of fire, unless it fermented! 

     Alternating vacuum and snake, I succeeded.

     Unless you consider the resident snake in the vent pipe. 

     The first load of clothes that went into the dryer got dry in record time.  So it wasn’t only a safety issue.  It was a step for energy efficiency.  When I get my report from the power company, maybe my electric usage will be closer to my energy-efficient neighbors.  (Except I’ve had to run the air conditioner more this year than ever before, but that’s another story.)
     Brother John suggested attaching a leaf blower to the vent pipe.  That makes a lot more sense, but I don’t have a leaf blower.  I could rent one but . . . . .

     I will have to try to get the snake out of the dryer vent  someday, but for now, I’m content with “let sleeping snakes lie,” or something like that.