EP #24 Unveiling the Critical Need for Dryer Vent Maintenance with Carlene Harris
May 02, 2024
Didier Nicholas
Ever wondered about the hidden perils that could be lurking in your laundry room? Carlene Harris of Dryer Vent Wizard joins us to illuminate the critical yet often-ignored service of professional dryer vent cleaning. With her vast knowledge, Carlene recounts an eye-opening case study of a client plagued by persistent dryer inefficiencies and perplexing water leaks. The issue stumped both the client's son and another service provider, but thanks to Carlene's expertise, the true problem was unveiled: an improperly installed and complex vent system. This tale is a stark reminder of the unseen dangers that can dwell unnoticed in our homes, and the episode serves as a crucial call to prioritize the health of your appliances through expert care.
Our heartfelt thanks go out to Carlene for sharing her insights and case studies that were nothing short of revelatory. If her stories have sparked your interest in the unsung heroes of the local service industry, we encourage you to put a spotlight on these dedicated professionals. For more information call 407.873.1080 or visit https://www.dryerventsouthorlando.com/
Ever wondered about the hidden perils that could be lurking in your laundry room? Carlene Harris of Dryer Vent Wizard joins us to illuminate the critical yet often-ignored service of professional dryer vent cleaning. With her vast knowledge, Carlene recounts an eye-opening case study of a client plagued by persistent dryer inefficiencies and perplexing water leaks. The issue stumped both the client's son and another service provider, but thanks to Carlene's expertise, the true problem was unveiled: an improperly installed and complex vent system. This tale is a stark reminder of the unseen dangers that can dwell unnoticed in our homes, and the episode serves as a crucial call to prioritize the health of your appliances through expert care.
Our heartfelt thanks go out to Carlene for sharing her insights and case studies that were nothing short of revelatory. If her stories have sparked your interest in the unsung heroes of the local service industry, we encourage you to put a spotlight on these dedicated professionals. For more information call 407.873.1080 or visit https://www.dryerventsouthorlando.com/
Speaker 1:
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, DDA Nicholas.
Speaker 2:
So hello everybody. We want to welcome to our Good Neighbor Podcast. We want to welcome back Carlene Harris with Dryer Vent Wizard. We're so excited to have you back, carlene.
Speaker 3:
Thank you, I'm excited to be here. Thanks.
Speaker 2:
You're very, very welcome. So what we're going to try to accomplish today, in this episode, we are going to discuss some of the reasons it's important to consult a professional when it comes to dryer vent cleaning, and who better to be able to discuss this with none other than Carlene Harris? Thank you, you're very welcome. So, carlene, let's kind of dive into this a little bit. I know you had a couple stories that you wanted to share, so I'm going to just be quiet and let you go ahead and share with our audience your message.
Speaker 3:
Well, today I think, as we talked about in the past, that there's a lot of reasons why dryer vents don't always dry the way they should. Sometimes you have to push that button three or four times to get a load of towels dry, and you know that takes our time away from us and doing things that we want to do, and so I'd like to share kind of a crazy story about one of the events that we in particular took care of.
Speaker 3:
This particular client had purchased her home in 2014. So we're talking a long term process here of problems that she was having Her clothes wouldn't dry properly. She never figured out exactly what to do along the way and at one point it got really bad. She had her son take the dryer off of the wall and pull it out and he reached in, cleaned a little bit, used the vacuum cleaner still no, no improvement at that time. So along the way, she happened to notice the ceiling in her home had water leaks. So she called in a plumber and the plumber checked everything out, because right above the dryer, the kitchen and the dining room where the dryer was sort of in the kitchen area was the master bathroom and there were no leaks. There was no reason that she should have ceiling marks.
Speaker 2:
And that would be normal for a homeowner to think that, right, oh yeah.
Speaker 3:
It's normal for a homeowner to think that right?
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah, definitely If they see water spots on your ceiling and the bathroom's above it. It's kind of putting one plus one equals two, but go ahead.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely Jumping to. Another client had the same type of issue above their bathroom and they in turn called a not only a plumber but an air conditioner company to come out, because that's the second thing Now. This particular lady did not call the air conditioning company. However, she knew that she still had a problem after the plumber, so she called another dryer vent service company and they came out, pulled out the dryer, cleaned the vent line and told her she was all good, Vent line clean, right.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you would. You would think right.
Speaker 1:
And the homeowner yeah.
Speaker 2:
And the homeowner doesn't know, doesn't know any better. She's like thank you, you know, have a good day and they're on their way.
Speaker 3:
There you go. And yet she still had the same problem. It had not gone away at all. So she happened to see our van driving through her neighborhood and she took a picture of it and gave us a quick call. We set up the appointment, went out to do an estimate.
Speaker 3:
My technician, hector, is my lead technician who's really great at diagnosing problems, has a tremendous background as a FEMA inspector so he's seen all kinds of disaster. He has a small engine repair background and repairs boat engines, so very technical minded and he thinks about problems. You know, when he sees things it leads him to other questions. That lead to other questions that eventually lead to solutions, and creative solutions at that. So in this particular incident he the first thing he did was pull out the dryer, just like everybody else did, and started looking into that and with just putting his flashlight in he could see that there was some sort of problem going on there. The vent pipe made a quick turn, a 90 degree elbow, which means every time you put in an elbow, 90 degrees equals five feet of pipe.
Speaker 3:
The ultimate goal of course, is the shortest length of pipe to have the most efficiency. So five feet right there before we even get started coming out of the gate. With a little more investigation there was another 90 very quickly and he could put his brush in about seven feet and hit a solid blockage.
Speaker 2:
Wow.
Speaker 3:
Led him to look for a, because seven feet was way short of an outside area. Look for the vent cover for a booster fan, which nobody had ever told her that she has Inspecting the booster fan and the actuator. It wasn't working and hadn't worked for years, and so nobody would really be cleaning anything past the seven feet anybody that she did have. Now she did not have regular cleaning, so even that was part of the problem. There was quite a bit of lint in the vent line, even with her son having done some work in this other cleaner. So he decided that he needed to go to the outside and find out where it was venting to, but he could not find the vent. It didn't appear to be on the roof, nothing was blowing, there was no airflow coming out of any of the vents, so we couldn't actually determine where the vent was and also there was no lint. Technically, on an outside vent you're going to see lint coverage and not there. So he told her that it was going to cost anywhere from two to three thousand dollars for the job, that we would have to open areas in her ceiling in order to trace the line and to figure out where the blockage is occurring and what the problem is.
Speaker 3:
To make a long story short, we opened two areas in the dining room, at both ends of the house, of that dining area, and we found? We found a total of six no seven 90 degree angles and four 45 degree angles. So 45 is two and a half feet. So if you add all that up along with the piping, we had 67 feet of vent line. Anything over 35 feet requires a booster fan. Hence why they put the booster fan in.
Speaker 3:
But it didn't work because it couldn't push too much pipe too many, excuse me, too many angles and there was the problem. Now this is now in. We're looking at the subfloor from the second floor and the pipe with all these angles was like a Z. It was going one way and then another and it was cutting through. They had divider plywood in between the rafters so we actually had to cut through some of those and we removed most of the 90 degree angles, cutting the vent line down to the 35 feet, which is a minimum.
Speaker 3:
You up the drywall as best we can, because we don't do drywall, so we don't finish it, but my technician surgically cuts it out so that it can be kind of set back in and somebody can either take out the whole sheet and repair it that way, or they can patch it up and whatever they choose to have done Started up the dryer. We have no problems. We have a happy client, we have a safe issue. She had such a fire hazard and, believe it or not, the whole whole clincher to the whole thing that that shows that this had been an ongoing problem since 2014 is that the vent line was clean from the booster fan out there. You know what we took out. There was very little lint in it, which means once that booster fan stopped, no more air was going through that vent line. So some of that lint was probably there since 2014.
Speaker 2:
yeah, and that's what I was going to ask you. How long do you think that was in there? And you just answered it since 2014.
Speaker 3:
Probably.
Speaker 2:
And it's amazing. I mean some of the hazards that, can you know, like you said could happen because of that she could have had a dryer fire right, she could have had a dryer fire, because that's a very dangerous situation.
Speaker 3:
Your dryer needs to vent to the outside and if there's any blockages, a blockage causes back pressure. The back pressure continues to force the lint back into the dryer cabinet. This is another thing that we do when we inspect. We inspect the dryer itself. We don't repair dryers, but we do take them apart and clean the inside of the dryer, because that is where dryer fires start most of the time. Have you ever seen a hand drill?
Speaker 2:
Yes.
Speaker 3:
And as you're running it, you see the sparking inside the vents. Well your motor of your dryer is doing the same thing. It's sparking. So with that back pressure you have lint floating around inside. All it takes is a spark to catch some of that lint and then you have a dryer fire. That's how they start. Sometimes they start somewhere else combustion or something on technical that I is beyond my um expertise. My technician could go through a whole story, I'm sure, with you, but um well speaking of stories.
Speaker 2:
That was a unbelievable story and it's not unusual.
Speaker 3:
You know this is not the first time we've cut open like I, the other person who called the air conditioner guy. We cut 15 feet of drywall out of their ceiling the length of the bathroom. It ran the long ways across. It was a long, skinny bathroom so we had to take all that out in order to get all the pipe out and put all the new pipe in in that case.
Speaker 3:
Another important issue is that if you do have a horizontal line as opposed to vertical, going straight up to a roof or even straight up and then a quick turn to a sidewall angled and then going on a sidewall, that if it's straight up, moisture is going up and out or falling back down, but in a horizontal moisture condensation is building up and then when it settles out it's laying on that pipe. So that was another issue here. The builder installed the pipe upside down. The seams were facing the ceiling as opposed to the roof. So when that condensation built up it started leaking through that crack, the seam where we put the pipe together. So of course, when we installed the new pipe, we put the seam facing the roof, which is proper, and tape them and then tape all the joints with a foil tape so that no moisture can seep through those seams any longer. Had that been done that way to begin with? Lan knows when she would have found out about the problem if she hadn't seen the leakage on the ceiling.
Speaker 2:
So I guarantee you she was very, very happy.
Speaker 3:
After all was said and done, you know she was very happy not so happy that her homeowner's insurance did not cover any of this because it was negligence of following manufacturer's instructions on maintaining the dryer and having it cleaned once a year the drug. So this is another issue that people are totally unaware of. That. You know, when you have a dryer fire, even if you are negligent in not having done the preventive measures to take care of that, your insurance company may not pay the whole claim. Or when your house burns down or some part of it. I have some firsthand experience on that too. My sister-in-law's home burned from a dryer fire.
Speaker 2:
I know you mentioned that on our last conversation that we had and wow, so it's amazing and as you continue to do this and you learn so many things that you become more of an expert in dealing with. Thank you so much for this. This is so great and I wanted to. Can you give our audience a way to get a hold of you? You know maybe your website and your phone number.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely. The franchise is Dryer Vent Wizard, so just easily, it's dry dryerventwizardcom and that would get you to our franchise website and and with your zip code it would connect you to me if you're in my territory. If you're outside of my territory, we also have Evans Reeves, who is a dryer vent wizard of North Orlando, and he's excellent. We work together all the time. As a matter of fact, right after this podcast, we'll be on the line working on a project together.
Speaker 2:
And your phone number.
Speaker 3:
Oh, 407-214-8351. That's my personal business cell and so if it rings more than twice, you will get our national call center. They can schedule appointments, but if you want to talk to me, just either hang up and call back and I'll answer within the two rings, or leave a message with the call center that I need to get in touch.
Speaker 2:
Well, thank you so much, Carlene. Thanks for coming back and joining us, and hopefully we'll have you back here in the near future as well.
Speaker 3:
Thank you, it's been a pleasure. You have a great day, dba. Bye-bye you too.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpwindermerecom. That's gnpwindermerecom, or call 407-783-8320.