She’s Crafty!
We started noticing that the dryer was taking forever to dry our clothes and I mean, forever. I thought that there might have been a kink or an obstruction or something in the dryer vent hose. The internet is great for all sorts of things, including how to clean our a dryer vent hose (which you’re totally supposed to do once a year, maybe even every six months! Well, we’ve been in this house for about three years and we never did it. But I’ve lived in several houses with washers and dryers and I never cleaned those vents either and I lived in those houses for like three to five years. So I didn’t know you needed to do it. And the dryers worked perfectly fine. Nobody told me, how was I supposed to know?
But anyway, I totally thought like a big ass rat or something had climbed in there and died (except there was never a rotting meat smell). It couldn’t be lint. I mean, the lint trap is pretty good at getting all the line. So the internet we went and read through a bunch of websites on how to clean the dryer vent hose. The internet has all the answers for everything. (Some answers might be wrong, however, but you can pretty much find anything on the internet).
Chris muscled the dryer out of the dinky little nook that our washer and dryers were in. (I had originally bought a washer and dryer that I REALLY wanted, only to have it delivered and find out that they were WAY TOO BIG. WTF. So I ended up with these Whirlpool one’s, still front loader, but much smaller and barely fit. And I mean barely. We can’t close the doors. But I’m meandering here.)
So Chris muscled the dryer out of the dinky nook and discovered that the dryer vent hose was A)way to f’in long and B) FILLED WITH WATER. WTF again!
Of course, I’ve forgotten to take photos of everything as I was concerned about the water. Chris read that you can get tetanus and a staph infection from stagnant water. So I donned on some gloves and poured the water carefully into a bucket (of which now I have to bleach in case of staph.). So what happened was that because the hose was so long, it had lots of kinks and in those kinks, water had accumulated in this u-shaped kink. Because this is a cheap ass hose that the installers had placed in, it started to stretch, thus making the u even longer and thus more able to hold water. And because there is water, the lint was just getting stuck in the water, thus making allowing more water to accumulate, thus more lint until eventually, you’ve got about a gallon of water and lint in that hose.
Here is the hose after we’ve detached it from the dryer. Look how effin long that is! Also notice that the outlet has a crack in it. How come those installers didn’t tell me they put a goddamned crack there? MF’s.
After you get rid of the water, you’re supposed to let that dry. If you don’t, you could get mold in there. Dude, how am I supposed to know if I’ve let it dry completely? You know what? No. So we just went out to buy a new dryer vent hose. And a nicer one to boot. This isn’t one of those flimsy hoses you use to make robot arms for your kid’s Halloween costume. These are some ridged tubes that won’t dip nor expand without some muscle. And then we installed it.
How did I get out of there? It involved a stool and some arm muscle. Those machines are as tall as my shoulders. We got risers for them so Chris wouldn’t have to bend down so much to put stuff in and take stuff out. It also meant that they are difficult to climb over.
So far, everything is working. The dryer works, the hose has stayed, elbow thingies too. So Chris is going to try a load of laundry tomorrow. Hopefully, nothing blows up!
Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal