Over this past summer we pulled into our court from picking the girls up from school to find what looked like 20 fire trucks in our court. That’s never a good feeling. As it turned out, they were NOT at our house, which was good for us but terrible for another family. The fire was caused by a dryer. No one was harmed, which is what’s most important, but the house had serious damages to it.
I don’t want to imagine what the outcome of that fire could have been if it wasn’t the middle of the day. It is common for us to throw a load into our dryer as we go to bed. With three daughters and my wife asleep…I don’t even want to think about it.
I’m not sure what the exact circumstances were in the fire, but I do know dryer fires are easily prevented by following a couple rules. And if saving your home from damage, your family from harm or displacement isn’t enough, these practices will even save you a few bucks on your energy bill.
Usually, a dryer fire is caused by either the exhaust port being clogged, even partially, forcing temperatures to rise high enough to ignite the lint and other things in there. Or, drying items that are wet with combustible products, such as gasoline, oil, thinners etc.
I’m not going to write about the second reason cause, well, just don’t put flammable things in the dryer to dry! It’s a no no. Hang them to dry or something. I will write about the first. I just took care of this in our home the other day, so it’s fresh in my mind.
The first thing you want to do is be sure to clean the lint screen with EACH and every load. It’s obvious. But many people who do multiple loads in a day sometime seem to forget this. This will help reduce the amount of lint that builds in your dryer port in the first place. It won’t stop it all though so you need to make it a regular practice to periodically clean the inside of your dryer exhaust and the vent duct to the outside. Once a year should do it, but twice is better.
I’m going to be taking some pictures of how to do this over the weekend and post a step-by-step on here. Unfortunately, while cleaning ours the other day I didn’t think I’d be writing about this, so I didn’t take any photos. It’s really pretty easy to do. So don’t “forget” to do it soon.
Your dryer will run better, last longer, dry faster and use less energy when it’s clean. Best of all, I can still throw a load in before bed and not be kept up by my conscious.
Check back soon for the step-by-step with pictures. And if there’s questions, use my contact page to send me a message.