AM I THE ONLY ONE . . . who occasionally gets alarmed by newspaper articles?

Recently, my sweetie showed me an article questioning, “how risky is it not to clean lint from your dryer?” The article (in the St. Lucie News Tribune) was written by Laurence Reisman and it showed photos of some pretty nasty looking clothes dryer exhaust vents, clogged with lint and warning of the fire dangers incumbent with not keeping your vents cleaned properly.

Sweetie was immediately concerned that our dryer needed to be cleaned and she was considering calling the man whom this article seemed to be championing. He’s a local Port St. Lucie man who has apparently made a business out of cleaning lint from clothes dryers. We hesitated, because the article indicated that it would cost $150.00 to have him come out to clean it for us. (Probably cheap, but still enough to make me think maybe I should look into it myself.)

Then, a week or so later, she came across an item on the internet, warning of the same problem, and accompanied by a short video of a dryer exhaust line completely clogged with lint. That finally got me off my butt to take a look at our clothes dryer. Fortunately, ours was in great shape. The exhaust line was completely lint free and after taking the front of the dryer off, I found it in pristine condition as well.

However, our lint filter was a different matter. Even though I always remove the loose lint from it before using the dryer, the screen was packed with lint. After some quick work with our dust buster, an old toothbrush and some soapy water, I was able to bring it back to something close to the condition it was in when it was new. Since this clogged filter most likely was affecting the efficiency of our dryer, I expect I’ll be paying closer attention to it in the future.

As it turned out, we really didn’t have much of anything to be concerned about, there was no fire hazard. I will say, however, that we both feel a lot better about having taken the time to check into the situation.

I recommend that you do the same. I think you’ll sleep better afterwards; we certainly have.

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Gramps use’ta say
©R.L.King2012 #545