Found out my drier vent was 80% blocked after I cleaned a 3-foot lint snake out of it

I was diagnosing a no-heat call at a house on Maple Street last Tuesday and figured it was the thermal fuse again. Popped the back panel and saw the vent was nearly solid with lint, like a giant grey slug in there. After I pulled it all out and cleared the path, the drier ran perfect and the customer said her clothes used to take 3 cycles to dry. Has anyone else found something wild blocking a vent, like a bird nest or something weirder?

2 comments

2 Comments

blairwhite1mo ago

I pulled a dryer vent once that had a family of mice living inside it. The lint had packed down so hard around their nest that it looked like concrete. Took me an hour with a shop vac and a wire brush to get it all out. The customer said her clothes smelled musty no matter what detergent she used. It was the mouse urine and dander baking into the fabric every cycle. She had to run two loads through with vinegar just to kill the smell.

eva_garcia561mo ago

Wait, how do you even find out there's mice in there before pulling the vent off? That sounds like a nightmare. I had a similar thing with my own dryer a couple years back - not mice, but a bird had somehow gotten into the vent pipe and built a nest. The smell was awful, like wet hay and something worse. I can't imagine running clothes through that for weeks without knowing. Props to you for sticking with that job, most people would have just told her to buy a new dryer.