How often should you clean your dryer vent?
Lint traps catch most of the lint, not all of it. The rest travels down the vent and builds up in the duct itself, where it doesn't just slow the dryer down — it's flammable, sitting right next to a heat source. Fire authorities consistently list clothes dryers among the more common sources of home structure fires, and a blocked vent is the leading mechanical cause. The fix is unglamorous and takes under an hour.
The schedule
- Every load — clean the lint trap itself. This is the one step almost everyone already does.
- Every 6–12 months — clean the full vent run from the back of the dryer to the exterior cap. Once a year is enough for most households; every six months if the vent run is long, has several bends, or the household does heavy laundry volume (a large family, cloth diapers, pet bedding).
- Immediately — any time the warning signs below show up, regardless of when it was last done.
Warning signs it's already overdue
A properly vented dryer should finish a normal load in one cycle. If any of these are true, lint is restricting airflow now, not at some future date:
- Clothes take noticeably longer to dry, or need a second cycle
- The dryer, or the laundry room, feels hotter than usual during a cycle
- Clothes come out hotter to the touch than normal
- A burning smell, however faint
- The exterior vent flap barely opens, or doesn't visibly move air, when the dryer is running
- Visible lint building up around the exterior vent cap
What the cleaning actually involves
Unplug the dryer (and shut off the gas valve first, if it's a gas dryer). Disconnect the vent hose from the back of the machine and the wall, and use a dryer vent brush kit — a flexible rod with a brush head, sold at any hardware store — to push lint out from both ends. Vacuum out what collects. For a straight, short run this is a 20–30 minute job. Long runs, rigid ductwork with several turns, or vents that go up through a roof are reasonable to hand to a dryer vent cleaning service instead — the brush kit has real limits around tight bends.
While it's disconnected, check that the ducting itself is rigid metal, not the white vinyl or foil accordion hose still found in some older installs — both are a known fire hazard and are barred by code in most places now for a reason. Worth replacing with rigid or semi-rigid metal duct if you find it, independent of the cleaning schedule.
Why this sits next to the furnace filter, not the appliance list
Like changing a furnace filter, this is airflow maintenance with a real safety consequence and zero visible urgency between the day it's fine and the day it's a genuine hazard. Nothing on the dryer tells you the vent is 80% blocked the way a check-engine light would. The only real defenses are noticing the warning signs above, and not needing to notice them because it's already on a schedule.
Keepit tracks this on its own clock
Set it once as a recurring task and Keepit reminds you when the vent is due — independent of whether anything seems wrong yet.
Get Keepit on the App Store →