Commercial Dryer Vent Cleaning

A lint screen catches plenty, but not everything. What slips past settles in the duct, which in a multi-story building may climb several floors to a roof cap residents never see and maintenance rarely visits. Lint packs into the bends and under that cap while the dryers below take longer and run hotter, load after load. Fire investigators name failure to clean as the leading factor in clothes-dryer fires. In a house, that fire threatens one household. In a stacked building, a fire that starts in one unit's vent can spread to the homes above and beside it.

Inside a unit, the job is a house call repeated down the hall. We pull the dryer, disconnect the transition and run a rotary brush through the wall or ceiling duct while a HEPA vacuum catches what breaks loose. On the roof we open each cap and lift out the mat of lint under it. A mesh bird guard gets cleared and written up, because mesh at a dryer exit acts as a second lint screen and the residential code forbids screens at the termination. Shared laundry rooms are a separate job. Commercial dryers follow the International Mechanical Code plus the maker's exhaust specifications for duct size, run length and makeup air, and we compare the installation against both.

Occupied buildings set the pace, so we plan the route with your office: which buildings on which days, which units need an escort, which residents want a morning slot. Your team sends the entry notices, and residents clear the space around the dryer. Hotel laundries and laundromats run on a different clock. Every machine has to be off and cool before we open a duct, so we come before the first loads or in hours you choose. Each unit then gets its own line: unit number, before-and-after photos, the airflow reading and any defect we found. A carrier, fire inspector or board asks for that record after a fire, and it only helps if it already exists.

Cleaning has limits, and it is better to hear them before the invoice. No brush fixes a duct that is too long, crushed inside a chase or made of foil. For household-size dryers we check each run against IRC M1502: 4-inch rigid metal duct, a 35-foot maximum developed length reduced for bends unless the dryer maker allows longer, a UL 2158A-listed transition no longer than 8 feet, a backdraft damper at the exit and no screen over it. A run that misses those marks can move too little air even when clean. The fix is a reroute or repair, sometimes through a finished ceiling, quoted separately. In a condo, the governing documents decide who pays.