This is the one piece of laundry maintenance that is a safety matter rather than a performance one. US fire authorities, including the National Fire Protection Association and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, identify clothes dryers as a regular cause of home structure fires, with failure to clean them the leading contributing factor. Lint is highly combustible, and a dryer that cannot exhaust properly runs hotter than it was designed to.
Warning Signs Worth Acting On
- Loads that take noticeably longer than they used to.
- Clothes that come out unusually hot to the touch at the end of a cycle.
- The outside of the dryer cabinet, or the laundry room itself, getting hot and humid during a cycle.
- A burning or scorched smell while the dryer runs.
- Little or no air coming from the exterior vent hood with the dryer running.
- Lint visible around the door seal, behind the machine, or at the outside hood.
If you smell burning, stop the dryer, unplug it or switch off its breaker, and do not restart it until it has been checked.
What to Clean, and How Often
- Every load: the lint screen.
- Every few months: vacuum the lint housing the screen sits in, and pull the dryer out to check the duct behind it is not crushed.
- At least once a year: clear the full duct run from the dryer to the exterior hood, and check that the hood flap opens freely. Long runs, multiple elbows and attic or crawl-space routes need doing more often.
Get the Ducting Right
Use rigid or semi-rigid metal duct. Plastic and thin foil accordion duct crush easily, sag into low spots that collect lint, and are not acceptable in many jurisdictions. Keep the run as short and straight as the layout allows, and never vent a dryer into an attic, a crawl space or the room itself: that pushes moisture and lint into the building. Gas dryers must vent outside for a further reason, because exhaust gases go out with the moisture.
What Not to Do While Waiting
Do not run a dryer you suspect is overheating, and do not remove or bypass a thermal fuse to get one more load out of it. That fuse is the protection device, and it failed because something upstream was already wrong. Book a Whirlpool dryer repair visit if the machine overheats with a clear vent.