The dryer vent fun

Here's a story that's going to be short in some places and long in others.  It's terribly exciting overall, but cool in some ways.

A few weeks ago, I discovered no air coming out of the vent on the outside of the house while the dryer was running.  I went downstairs and noticed that there was lint gathered around the hole in the wall where the dryer vent went in and that the lint was swaying in some kind of breeze.  Uh Oh.

Procrastination takes hold as I contemplate all the things that I might have to do here.  I have spent considerable time behind this dryer replacing parts and attaching and re-attaching the hose, so I know how much fun it can be.  The other part of this is that we had our downstairs bathroom re-done a couple of years ago and I was not looking forward to the probability of having to tear up the wall to find the problem.

After coming home one day when it was 105 degrees outside with the A/C running at full tilt inside, I noticed it was considerably warmer in the kitchen than anywhere else.  I figured out that this was due to the dryer venting into the wall downstairs and that warm air coming up through various hidden holes and crevices into the kitchen.  Needless to say, procrastination stopped.

I wasn't willing to simply start tearing up the wall to see if i could find the problem.  I needed a way to see how far in the break had occured.  After some great advice from my lovely wife, I came up with this contraption to be able to get live video from the inside of the dryer vent.

This piece of ingenuity is made up of the following:  1. mini wireless video camera originally intended for an aerial video project I still want to do.  2.  9-volt battery to power it.  3.  small flashlight strapped to battery to provide light.  4.  dryer vent cleaning brush with the bristles taped flat with all of the above strapped to it, to be able to push the camera rig into the dryer vent AND be able to control and retrieve it.

The camera transmits to a receiver which I had hooked into our USB TV tuner which was plugged into our laptop which was running Windows Media Encoder so that I could see the live feed (and record some) of what was in the tube (phew!).  This worked very well from the outside of the house going down into the vent.  I had to take the camera rig off of the vent brush and put it into our shop-vac hose to be able to get it to go in the flexible tubing in the basement.

What I found was that the vent was very clogged at the top and needed to be cleaned out and that the vent tubing had a complete break about 3 feet away from the hole in the wall in the basement.  I felt very good that I didn't have to completely guess where the break was and I also had an idea of what other cleaning I had to do.

Actual repairs to be seen in following post.  I can't have all of the excitement in one!