Clean the dryer vent at least once a year. Clean the lint screen before or after every load. Clean the vent sooner than a year if your laundry is taking longer to dry than it used to.

The NFPA’s clothes dryer safety tip sheet says both things. Clean the lint filter before or after each load. Then, once a year, or more often if clothes are taking longer than normal to dry, clean lint out of the vent pipe, or have a dryer lint removal service do it for you.

The same sheet says the leading cause of home clothes dryer fires is failure to clean them. That is the reason this small job is worth a date on the calendar.

The rest of this post is how to tell which schedule your house needs, how to spot a clog early, and how to keep the yearly one from slipping.

The lint screen and the vent are two different jobs

People mix these up, so it is worth being clear.

The lint screen is the mesh tray you pull out of the door or the top of the dryer. You peel the fuzz off with your fingers. This one is every load.
The dryer vent is the pipe that carries hot, wet air from the back of the dryer to the outside of your house. It might be three feet long. It might be twenty. This one is yearly.

The screen catches most of the lint. It does not catch all of it. The rest rides down the pipe and settles there, a little at a time, for months. So a house with a spotless lint screen can still have a packed vent.

One more rule from the NFPA, and it is short: do not use the dryer without a lint filter.

How often to clean the dryer vent

Once a year is the baseline for most single-family homes.

Move to every six months if any of these sound like your house:

Four or more people doing laundry
A dog or a cat that sheds
Towels, sheets, and blankets most weeks, because they shed a lot of lint
A long vent run, or one with several bends in it
A dryer in a basement or an inside closet, far from an outside wall

Clean it now, whatever the calendar says, if drying is taking longer than it used to. That is the warning sign the NFPA names.

If the manual for your dryer gives its own schedule, follow that one. The manual beats any general list, including this one.

Signs the vent is clogged

Watch for these:

Clothes need a second cycle to finish
Clothes come out hot but still damp
The dryer or the laundry room feels unusually hot
A burning smell, or the smell of hot lint
Little or no air puffing out of the outdoor vent flap while the dryer runs
The outdoor flap stays shut, or it is packed with fuzz
Lint collecting on the floor behind the dryer

If you smell burning, or the machine feels hot, stop. Turn the dryer off and unplug it. For a gas dryer, shut the gas valve too. Then get the vent looked at, by you or by a pro. Do not run another load to find out whether it happens again.

How to check the vent in five minutes

Start a load and go outside to the vent flap.
Hold your hand near it. You should feel steady warm air, and the flap should be open.
Look at the flap itself. Lint, a bird nest, or snow all block it. The NFPA calls out snow by name, so this is a winter check as well as a yearly one.
Back inside, pull the dryer out a foot. Look at the hose behind it. It should not be crushed, kinked, or pulled loose.
Look at the floor back there. A pile of lint means air is escaping somewhere it should not.

This check is worth doing a few times a year. It takes longer to read than to do.

Cleaning it yourself

A short, straight run is a reasonable job to do yourself. You need a dryer vent brush kit, which is a long bendy brush made for this, and a vacuum helps.

Unplug the dryer. For a gas dryer, shut off the gas valve as well. If you are not sure how, stop here and call a pro.
Pull the dryer away from the wall, far enough to work behind it. Go slow, so you do not strain the cord or the gas line.
Loosen the clamp and pull the hose off the back of the dryer.
Vacuum the lint out of the hose from both ends.
Push the brush into the duct and pull it back out. Keep going until it stops bringing lint with it.
Go outside and clean the last stretch from the flap end.
Vacuum the floor and the wall behind the dryer while you are back there.
Reattach the hose, tighten the clamp, and slide the dryer back without crushing the hose.
Plug it in, turn the gas back on if you shut it off, run a cycle, and go check for warm air at the outdoor flap.

Write the date down when you finish. That date is what tells you whether next year’s cleaning is due.

When to call a pro

Call a dryer vent cleaning service, or an appliance pro, when:

The duct runs through a wall, a ceiling, or out through the roof
The run is long, or you cannot tell where it goes
The dryer is stacked, or wedged into a closet you cannot get behind
The duct is shared with other units in a building
It is a gas dryer and you are not comfortable moving it. The NFPA says gas dryers should be inspected by a qualified professional, to make sure the gas line and the connection are intact and free of leaks.
You already cleaned it and the clothes still take too long

Hiring it out is a normal choice, not a failure. The NFPA lists a lint removal service right next to doing it yourself.

If you do hire someone, keep their name and the date. A year from now you will want to know who came and what they said. Keeping track of home contractors covers what is worth writing down.

The pipe itself matters

A vent cleaned every year still runs badly if the pipe is wrong.

Use rigid or flexible metal venting. The NFPA says metal venting material should be used to keep air moving and drying times normal. White plastic hose and thin foil hose are not that.
Shorter and straighter is better. Every bend is a place lint stops.
Do not crush the hose when you push the dryer back. A squashed elbow behind the machine is easy to create and easy to miss.
The flap outside should swing open when the dryer runs, and fall shut when it stops.
The vent should end outdoors. Not in the attic, not in a crawlspace, not in the laundry room.

The hard part is remembering

Cleaning a dryer vent takes an hour, once a year. Remembering it is the part that goes wrong.

Nothing in the house tells you. The vent clogs slowly and quietly, behind a machine nobody moves. By the time towels need two cycles, it has been getting worse for a year.

A shared house makes it harder. One person cleans it, nobody else knows, and eighteen months later two people each assume the other one handled it.

Tobi’s maintenance log is built for exactly this kind of job. Your dryer becomes a record in your home. “Clean dryer vent” becomes a task on it that repeats on whatever interval you pick, yearly or every six months. When someone marks it done, the next date moves forward on its own.

A few things that help with this one:

Every completion is saved with the date, who did it, and notes. Nothing is written over, so you can see when it was last done and how it looked.
If you hire a vent cleaning service, the work can be logged under that contractor instead of a person, so the service history stays in one place.
Tobi reminds you the day it is due, and again the next day if it is still not done.
Assign it to one person, or leave it open so the whole house sees it.

Everyone in the household sees the same record on their own phone, in real time. So the vent shows as due for the whole house, and once it is done, it is done for everyone. One subscription covers the household and only the owner pays, so the people you live with cost nothing extra to add. The pricing page has the numbers.

Common questions

How often should a dryer vent be cleaned?

Once a year for most homes. Every six months if you do a lot of laundry, have pets that shed, or have a long duct. Sooner than either if drying starts taking longer.

Is the lint trap the same as the dryer vent?

No. The lint trap, or lint screen, is the mesh tray inside the dryer that you clean every load. The vent is the duct that carries the air outside, and it collects lint over months. Cleaning one does not clean the other.

My lint screen is always clean. Do I still need to do the vent?

Yes. Fine lint slips past the screen every load. That is the lint sitting in your duct right now.

How long does cleaning the vent take?

On a short, straight run behind a dryer you can reach, plan on an hour with a brush kit. A long duct through a wall or a roof is a different job, and that is the one to hand to a pro.

What about a ventless or heat pump dryer?

There is no duct to the outside, so there is no vent to clean. Those machines have their own filters, and usually a condenser to rinse. Both are on the schedule in the manual, and both still need to be somebody’s job.

I rent. Is this mine to do?

Ask before you start. Cleaning the lint screen is always on you. A duct in a wall usually belongs to the landlord or the building. Either way, report it in writing when drying slows down, and keep a copy of what you sent.

Put it on the schedule

The dryer vent is one of about a dozen jobs in a house that come back on a clock. The furnace filter. The gutters. The water heater. The smoke alarms.

None of them are hard. They just fail quietly, on their own timers, while everyone is busy. The home maintenance schedule that actually survives real life lays out the short version of that list, and how often to change your furnace filter is the other one people ask about most.

Pick your date, do the vent, and write down that you did it. The writing down is what makes next year easy.

How often to clean your dryer vent