It is a well-known fact that preventative maintenance is the best way to care for your home, car, lawn mower, and any other things we want to last a long time. The ability to make small repairs proactively is far better than big expensive repairs reactively. The question is how do you know if you need a repair? How do you know if expensive deterioration and damage is beginning to develop? What is the best way to learn about issues and what areas of concern are most pressing?

The short answer is an inspection of the system. This is the best and most cost-effective way to stay on top of the status of your vent. If you are not made aware of the issue during an inspection, you will usually become aware when the system fails or malfunctions. Whether you have a pre-buying inspection on a home or notice the leak under your sink, becoming aware of issues is your first line of defense.
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Your dryer vent system is critical to the health of your dryer, and the level of ease you experience while doing your daily chores and activities. That being said, this system is very easily overlooked. Having scheduled inspections will help with staying on top of it.  The best way to inspect the dryer vent system is to have it cleaned by a specialist that evaluates the system from both the interior and exterior of the home. Interior access is critical to the cleaning and inspection of the dryer vent. We can determine many things from cleaning a dryer vent. Our technicians can provide you with a recommended cleaning frequency, dryer vent performance levels, and identify breaks in the line. Approximately 10% of the jobs we complete require additional repair and the majority of systems will perform better following a cleaning.  

For most of us, our homes are our biggest investment and damage and/or required repair to our home will have a big impact on its value. When a dryer vent system is broken, warm moist air produced from the dryer is exhausting somewhere inside the building. Most commonly it is vented into a wall or floor cavity, attic or crawlspace. The warm moist air will then condensate in these areas which can be a source for mold or dry rot damage.

Mold remediation and dry rot to a structure is significant and very costly. When you have your dryer vents cleaned we strongly recommend arranging interior access so that the technician can verify the vent is intact and airflow is terminating at the correct location. If it is determined a repair is needed invest the couple hundred and save yourself a lot of money down the road.
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Based on quick analysis of our 4th quarter 2017 data, the average cost to repair a broken dryer vent was $234. This is relatively inexpensive considering the cost of damage to your home if mold, dry rot or other damage is caused.