Sometime
during the winter while running through our lists of things to do,
we discovered the dryer vent system was in complete
disrepair. When I first inspected the dryer vent at the
outside of the house I thought it was missing the damper. Turns out
there was so much lint at the exit, the damper was permanantly
forced open. If there was that much lint at the exit, what was
the condition of the rest of the system? Jen cracked open the four
inch pipe to find a third of it full of lint. Ironically the flexi
pipe running to the location of the dryer was completely clear.
Our suspicion is the flexi pipe was new when we bought the
house.
Since it's winter, we decided to create a
winter indoor solution. We ran all new rigid pipe from the
dryer. The dryer venting passes through our workroom
downstairs, so for the winter, we simply terminated the pipe into
the workroom space. This provides some heat and moisture to a part
of the house that wouldn't normally get it. We put an old nylon on
the end of the pipe to catch lint. So far it works great. When
it warms up outside, we'll continue the pipe to the outside and
install a new damper. In the fall we'll revert back to the inside
system and so-on and so
forth.
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Now that the
weather is nicer, I continued with the dryer vent project. I removed
the old in-operable
vent/damper and installed this new one. I
also installed solid ductwork from the inside terminous to the
new vent. The only thing left is to add the
critter guard that came with the vent. The critter guard is a
plastic cage like thing that goes over the vent to prevent
critters from getting inside. Because the deck was
so poorly designed, I have to make some
modifications to the pictured joist to get the guard to
fit.
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So I borrowed my Dad's
sawzall and finally cut out the beam for the critter guard to fit.
The critter guard
required some modification
too, but it's all done now. This project is complete.
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