Maintenance & care · August 2026 · HVAC Iowa City

How to clean a dryer vent, step by step

A dryer vent is the duct that carries hot, damp air and lint from the back of your dryer to the outside of the house. Lint slips past the screen on every load and settles in that duct, and over time it packs in. A clogged vent makes the dryer run longer and hotter, wastes energy, and is a recognized fire risk. The good news is that a routine cleaning is a job many homeowners can do themselves, and this guide walks through it, plus the point where it is smarter to call.

Why this matters here: Iowa City has a lot of older housing, with the median home built in 1984, per Census Bureau housing data. In houses that age, the dryer often sits against an interior wall, so the vent runs long and bends several times before it reaches outside. Long, twisting runs collect the most lint. Add a five-month heating season with the house shut tight, and the duct loads up faster than most people expect.

First, the tools. You want a dryer vent brush kit, the kind with flexible rods that link together to reach the length of the run. A vacuum with a hose helps, and so does a screwdriver or a nut driver for the clamp behind the dryer. That is genuinely all. If your run is short and straight, even just the brush and the vacuum will do.

Step one: unplug the dryer, and if it is a gas dryer, this is the honest line where a lot of homeowners should stop. Cleaning the lint out of the vent duct is fine. Disturbing the gas connection is not. If moving the dryer means touching the gas line, leave it, and let us pull the unit safely as part of the cleaning.

Step two: pull the dryer out gently, only as far as the vent and any gas line allow, and loosen the clamp that holds the flexible duct to the wall fitting. Step three: run the brush into the duct and work it in and out, feeding the rods together to reach the full length. Pull the loosened lint back toward you and vacuum it up as you go. Do not forget the short duct on the back of the dryer itself, which clogs just as readily.

Step four: go outside to the vent hood, the flap where the duct exits the house. Open it, brush and vacuum out the lint that collects right at the opening, and make sure the flap swings freely. A flap stuck shut with lint is a common and easy-to-miss cause of poor drying. Step five: reconnect everything, push the dryer back, plug it in, and run it on a heat cycle for a few minutes. Go back outside and confirm a steady stream of warm air is pushing the flap open. That stream is how you know the run is clear.

Two safety notes worth more than any step. Never use a leaf blower or a high-pressure setup that can tear a hole in the duct inside a wall, and never reconnect a dryer to the old ribbed white plastic duct if you find it, since that material is a known fire hazard and should be replaced with smooth metal. And if the run is long, buried in a wall or ceiling, crushed, or vents into an attic or crawl space instead of outside, that is past a routine cleaning. That is when a professional dryer vent cleaning pays for itself.

So the short version: unplug it, brush the full run from both ends, clean the outdoor hood, and confirm the airflow is back. Do it once a year, sooner if drying starts taking two cycles. And when the vent fights back, or you would rather not move a gas dryer yourself, that is exactly what our dryer vent cleaning service is for, with the price named before we come out.