Typical visit 60 to 120 minutes, one technician
How often Once a year, more with a long run or a large household
Scheduling Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Service area Six counties across Southeast Michigan
Why the run matters more than the lint trap
Everyone cleans the screen. Almost nobody cleans the duct behind the machine, which is where the lint that gets past the screen actually collects. On a straight run through a rim joist that is a short pipe and a small problem. On a basement laundry pushed to an interior wall it can be twenty-five feet of duct with three elbows, and every elbow is a place lint stops moving.
Michigan makes it worse in a specific way. Cold outside air meets warm moist exhaust inside a metal duct, and the moisture condenses on the pipe wall. Damp lint packs instead of blowing through. A vent that stayed clear through a humid August can choke in January, which is why the calls cluster in the middle of winter.
The load on the machine is the part homeowners feel first. A restricted duct means the dryer cannot shed moisture, so the cycle runs again, and the heating element and the thermal fuse both work outside what they were designed for. Longer cycles, hotter clothes and a laundry room that feels humid are all the same fault. This work pairs naturally with the home fire safety package.
Signs the vent is restricted
Clothes take two cycles
A load that used to dry in forty-five minutes and now needs ninety is the clearest signal there is. Nothing about the machine changed. The air it needs to push out is not leaving the house, so the moisture goes back into the clothes.
The laundry room feels humid
Warm damp air around the machine means exhaust is escaping at a joint rather than travelling to the hood. Look for a duct that pulled loose behind the dryer, which happens every time the machine gets moved to clean behind it.
No flap movement at the hood
Go outside with the dryer running and watch the hood. The damper should be open with steady warm air behind it. A flap that barely lifts, or one packed with lint you can see from the ground, means the run is blocked near the end.
The winter months are when it bites
Condensation inside the duct is a cold weather problem, so a vent that was passable in September is the one that fails in January. Households in older houses around Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor with the laundry in the basement have the longest runs and the most elbows, which is the worst combination.
Booking it in the fall is the calm version. The run gets cleared before the cold sets the lint, and if the duct itself turns out to be the wrong material or the wrong length, there is time to deal with that before winter rather than during it.
What the visit covers
The same sequence every time, from the hood back to the machine. Anything found outside this list gets written down and quoted rather than added while the dryer is pulled out.
- Pull the machine and disconnect the transition duct
- Brush and vacuum the full run from both ends, hood and interior
- Clear the exterior hood and free the damper so it opens and closes
- Replace a crushed or foil transition duct with rigid or semi-rigid metal, which is the single most common fault we find
- Reconnect, seal the joints, run a cycle and confirm airflow at the hood before we leave
You get a note of the run length, the material and the elbow count, so the next visit starts with a record instead of a guess. It is the same write-up we leave on an annual home check.
Where our work stops
Wright’s Repairs is a renovation and repair crew. Appliance work and duct work are two different things and the line sits between them.
Work we take on
- Cleaning the full duct run and the exterior hood
- Transition duct replacement and joint sealing
- Damper repair and hood screen removal where one was fitted wrongly
Work we do not take on
- Repairing the dryer itself, including elements and thermal fuses
- Gas dryer connections, which go to a licensed contractor
- Cutting new exterior penetrations, which is a separate quoted scope
If the machine is faulty rather than the duct, we say so and stop. If the run is the problem in a way that cleaning cannot fix, because it is too long, crushed inside a wall or vented into a crawl space, that becomes dryer vent replacement and gets quoted on its own.
Questions homeowners ask
Related repair and maintenance work
Laundry rooms bring several small jobs at once. These are the services homeowners most often book alongside a vent cleaning.
Most households add a check of the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors in the same visit, and owners in an older house often look at the laundry room layout while the machine is out. Exterior hoods and flashing fall under exterior repair, and the whole seasonal list runs through spring home maintenance.
The full catalog sits under Wright’s Repairs services. View our Portfolio or contact us now for a free quote.
