Kankakee Riverview home: a 41-foot dryer vent run and a dryer that took two cycles

By Jacob Dove, Friendship Chimney Sweep

What the homeowner told us

The call came in on a Tuesday evening from a house in the Riverview district, one of the big early-1900s homes set back from the Kankakee River. Towels were coming out damp after a full cycle, the laundry room felt humid, and the top of the dryer was hot to the touch. The owner had already priced a new dryer. Before that, they wanted someone to look at the vent, which was the right instinct.

Houses of that age were never designed with a dryer in mind. The laundry ended up wherever a drain and a 240-volt circuit could be run, and in this house that was the back corner of the basement, on the side of the house farthest from any exterior wall that was practical to cut through. So the vent went the long way.

What we measured

We traced the run with a tape and a camera. From the back of the dryer: an eight-foot foil transition, crushed flat where the dryer had been pushed against the wall, then rigid metal pipe running along the joists for about thirty feet, four 90-degree elbows to get around a beam and a cast-iron stack, and finally a wall hood on the river side whose damper flap was stuck partly shut with lint. By our tape the physical length was about 41 feet [Observed].

The model-code rule of thumb for a dryer exhaust is a maximum of 35 feet of equivalent length, with each 90-degree elbow counting as an extra five feet, unless the dryer maker allows more. Counting the elbows, this run was well past sixty equivalent feet. Airflow at the hood was barely noticeable with the dryer running. Every one of those elbows had a lint shelf, and the joist section held more lint than the rest of the run combined, because it was the low point where moist air cooled and dropped what it carried.

What we did about it

First the cleaning: rotary brush and air from both ends, the hood cleaned and its flap freed, the lint bagged and shown to the owner before it left the house. That alone brought the drying time back close to normal. But a clean long run clogs again fast, so we also fixed the geometry. We replaced the crushed foil with a short listed semi-rigid transition, and with the owner’s approval rerouted the last section through a rim joist on a closer wall, which cut two elbows and roughly fourteen feet of pipe. Joints were sealed with foil tape, not screws, since screw tips inside a dryer duct catch lint.

Jacob Dove, who has 29 years in the trade and still leads the crew on jobs like this, put it simply to the owner: a dryer vent should be as short and straight as the house allows, and older Kankakee homes rarely allow it without a little rerouting. We are Insured & Bonded, we work chimneys to the NFPA 211 standard, and we treat a dryer vent with the same seriousness because a lint fire behind a wall starts the same way a flue fire does. Our rates for cleaning and rerouting are published on the pricing page.

If this sounds like your house: we handle dryer vent cleaning across Kankakee County, and our Kankakee page covers what we usually find there. Call (815) 449-4264, 7am to 9pm, any day.

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