Your clothes dryer accounts for a huge 12% of the electrical power used in an average household, and that’s when the vent is not plugged! With a vent that’s plugged and you’re running the dryer 2 or 3 times you can easily see why you have a high hydro bill! If you are running your dryer on the sensor dry setting, where it decides when the clothes are dry, you probably don’t even know how long it takes to dry your clothes?
We see so many issues with badly installed dryer vents that it is unbelievable. The shoddy workmanship, lack of consideration for the safety of the family, not following code and failing to put proper roof vents are just some of the examples we see everyday. If these were cars we were looking at they would be recalled, how come no one seems to care about this is beyond us!
Earlier this year we had a call to a home where the dryer was taking 4 cycles to dry each load! The fact it was taking this long would have meant the electricity costs were through the roof! The dryer vent was missing all the Louvre’s so it was a nice place to store their winter supply of food and it kept warm whilst the dryer was running.
Dryer fires happen, there are over 15,000 each year in North America. In Ontario we do not hear them mentioned very often but ask most people and they know someone who has had a dryer fire!
Following 2 recent dryer fires in Hamilton, Ontario we put together this video that shows how and why dryer fires happen.