Here’s a guide from our professional Chicago dryer vent cleaning team on the strangest items or materials we often find stuck in dryer vents – and how to remove them.
How do items other than lint get inside dryer vents?
If you look inside your dryer, it might seem like there’s no way something as large as a sock can get into your dryer vents. However, when lint traps get dislodged during a drying cycle or are not replaced properly after cleaning, there’s more than enough space for a sock or other items to get sucked up by the powerful dryer vent, as well as a wide range of other non-lint particles.
Other Common Items in Dryer Vents
Pet Hair
If you have a pet at home, rest assured that pet hair ends up in your dryer vent. Just consider how much pet fur sticks on your clothes on a daily basis since pet fur sticks more on wet clothes in washing machines, the majority of it flies off in your dryer. This includes pet fur from washing beds, towels, or blankets that your pet regularly uses.
Fragmented Objects
Similar to how lint can flake off your laundry as it washes or dries, other objects can shed from your clothes including:
- Dryer sheet fragments
- Fragments from tissues left in your pockets
- Threads from blankets, towels, or clothing
- Plastic fragments from items with hard outer shells like sports equipment
Objects from Pockets
Any objects in your pockets like wrappers, ID cards, small toys, pieces of candy, or really anything can easily get sucked into your lint trap and end up in your dryer vent. If you have children at home, the chances of this happening drastically increases!
Animal Materials
If your exterior dryer vent cover has a hole, opening, or the wrong kind of cover, animals like bugs, birds, mice, or other rodents can find their way into your dryer vent – especially during the winter. Dryer vent areas exude warmth, which makes an ideal area for animals to make their winter nests. We see this all the time in the Winter months. Our team can rapidly clean animal waste, refuse, and the remains of nests from your entire dryer vent system as well as installing a proper vent guard to keep animals away from your dryer vents.