Dryer Vent Cleaning in West Carson, CA

On the 1950s and 60s tracts here, the original exterior hoods are usually thin metal with a light flapper, and after decades of refinery and truck-route grit settling on them the flap either sticks open or stops closing at all. If the hood body is solid and the only problem is lint packed behind the flapper, cleaning it out and freeing the hinge is enough. If the metal is flaking, the flap is bent, or someone has replaced it with a plastic louvered cover that's now brittle from sun, replacing the hood is the better call — it's a small part, and a hood that won't shut lets pests and outside dust straight back into the duct. We'll tell you which one you're looking at once the cover is off, not before.

Quite a bit. The original West Carson layouts put the dryer on a service porch or in the garage with a short run straight through the wall, which is about as easy as dryer venting gets. When laundry gets relocated to an interior room, the new duct usually gets run up and across the attic to reach an exterior wall or the roof, and that added length, plus the elbows needed to get there, is where lint collects. Those are the homes where we spend the most time, and where we most often find flex duct that's sagging between joists or crushed where it turns.