In the past 2 years since we bought our house I have learned quite a few fun facts and things that should be done as maintenance that are things I did not necessarily pick up from the parents. A few weeks after signing our lives away, my mom paid for a chimney sweep to come out and clean out our disgusting chimney. After scrubbing the bricks and walls in the den to get the black grimy stuff off of it and failing miserably, having a professional do it sounded fantastic.
This tells you so much about me, but I really was expecting (not realistically maybe, but I still wanted it) to have someone appear with tophat and British accent to sweep the chimney. Instead, it was a very nice soft spoken man with no Southern accent (that seemed odd being in GA). But they vacuumed and sucked all kinds of debris out of the chimney and found out that someone prior had been burning pine which is a no-no and the inside of the chimney was almost completely closed up. Even better, it was so bad that the first thing out of his mouth was "thank god it isn't cold and you haven't started to try to burn a fire - you'd probably burn your house down". Considering I really would like to keep my house in working order and the idea of shuffling 6 furkids outside because of a fire doesn't appeal to me....I listen when these people give me tips. Technically, I'm supposed to be burning those logs that clean the chimney, but 2 years into owning the house and I've never tried to have a fire. One, I'm always so hot and two - that whole allergy thing. Also doesn't help that there aren't doors on the fireplace which makes it iffy in my world with the furries. Now that it's about time that I really should have the guys come out again (and patch my concrete on the top and put on a damn chimney cap so I don't have more bluejays nesting in there), I end up thinking first about the dryer vent.
So we got the new washer and dryer last year and they work great. But, I noticed that if you look in from the outside of the house, the vent is pretty gunked up. Since I wash the dog beds and stuff here and add to the lint issues, I scheduled an appt with sears online to come clean out the vent just in case. If there's anything I've learned with this house, most likely things have never been cleaned out since it was built 40 years ago.
Sears just came out and of course there was an added fee because our vent goes into the crawlspace. But there's something to be said when the technicians (who were extremely nice) look in the exhaust pipe and are actually amazed at how gunked up it actually is. So, they took the pipes apart and cleaned them and reset the washer and dryer up. Yet again, I was right in my assumptions. The lead tech explained that it really was 40 years worth of lint in there and that the pipes still had the original (and antiquated now) tape on them. He was glad to clean it out because he figured we may start having problems in the next year had we not gotten it cleaned out and - supposedly our dryer will work a bit better now since more air can exhaust out. I'm just glad now that Maddie can't eat the lint outside that was blowing out.
So lesson of the day: dryer vents are supposed to be cleaned every 2 years. Same goes for the duct work in your house apparently. At least the air ducts around the house were new when we bought the house so I got one thing that didn't have to be cleaned.
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