Clean the lint screen after every load, wash that screen with soap and water monthly, wipe the drum and the moisture-sensor bars quarterly, and clear the vent duct at least once a year. The yearly one is the safety item — published U.S. fire-safety guidance names failure to clean as the leading contributing factor in home dryer fires.
That’s the whole rule. If you’d rather not be the one auditing bottles — we bring our own, eco-friendly by default, and we follow whatever note you leave on your booking. Message us and we’ll send a price for your place.
The whole cadence, in one place
- Every load — the lint screen. Pull it, roll the lint off with your fingers or a dry cloth, and put it back before you start. The dryer never runs without the screen in place.
- Monthly — the screen, with soap. Warm water, dish soap, a soft brush, then dry it completely before it goes back in. This one is aimed at softener film, not at lint.
- Quarterly — the drum, the sensor, the slot. A damp cloth around the drum, the same cloth over the two metal moisture-sensor bars, and a crevice tool down the slot the lint screen slides into.
- At least yearly — the duct. The whole run, from the back of the machine to the hood outside. That is the part that burns.
Why the screen needs soap
Dryer sheets and liquid softener leave a very thin film across the mesh. You can’t see it, you can’t feel it, and pulling the lint off doesn’t remove it — it builds layer on layer until a screen that looks spotless passes noticeably less air than it should. Less air means longer cycles, hotter laundry, and more lint pushed on down the duct, which is exactly where you don’t want it.
The test takes ten seconds: run tap water onto the screen. If it falls straight through, the mesh is clean. If it beads or pools, the film is there and the screen needs washing. That monthly wash is one of the few home-maintenance jobs whose result you can verify yourself, on the spot.
The moisture sensor, and why your dryer lies
Almost every modern dryer has an “auto dry” cycle that doesn’t count minutes — it measures. Inside the drum, near the lint-screen opening, sit two curved metal bars; each time wet laundry touches them it completes a circuit, and when it stops completing it the machine decides the load is dry and shuts down. Softener residue settles there too. With the bars coated, wet clothes stop making good contact, the dryer calls itself finished early, and you pull out a damp load and run it again — two cycles for one load, and the power bill notices.
It is a damp cloth and thirty seconds, four times a year. Do it when you wipe the drum, and while you are there, vacuum inside the lint-screen slot — a mat of lint packs down there that no amount of shaking the screen will reach.
The signs the duct is overdue
The yearly interval exists for one reason: lint is fuel, and a restricted duct leaves it packed where the heat is. That is why the fire-safety material published by the National Fire Protection Association and the U.S. Fire Administration names failure to clean as the leading contributing factor in home clothes-dryer fires — a maintenance item, not bad luck. And a dryer tells you it is coming, if you know the tells:
- A normal load needs two cycles, with the screen and the sensor bars already clean.
- Laundry comes out genuinely hot to the touch at the end of a cycle, not warm.
- The laundry room heats up and feels humid while the dryer runs — the heat and moisture that should be leaving through the duct are staying in the house.
- Outside, the flapper on the hood barely lifts, or you feel no push of air with the dryer running.
- There is lint gathered around the outside hood, or a burnt or musty smell when the machine starts up.
In Miami those signals arrive sooner than they would elsewhere, because the machine starts at a disadvantage: the air it pulls from the room is humid air, so a half-blocked duct stretches the cycle enough to notice in weeks rather than years. Add the local details — an unventilated laundry closet, a coastal hood whose flapper has seized with salt, or a gecko or wasp that moved in behind a flapper that no longer shuts. After a storm, that outside hood is worth a close look.
The duct, if the run is short
A short, straight run that exits through an exterior wall behind the machine is a one-hour job with a flexible-rod brush kit, the sort any hardware store sells. In order:
- Disconnect. Unplug the dryer. If it is a gas dryer, there is a gas valve behind it — if you are not comfortable shutting that valve and moving the machine, stop here and call a professional.
- Pull it out and free the duct. Walk the dryer forward and disconnect the duct from the exhaust port on the back.
- Vacuum both ends. Crevice tool into the machine’s exhaust port and into the open duct, before any brush goes in.
- Brush from both ends. Feed the brush in from the inside end, pull the lint back out with it, then repeat from the hood outside. Alternating ends removes lint; always pushing the same direction just packs it into the next elbow.
- Clean the hood itself. Clear the flapper and check that it swings open and falls shut on its own.
- Reconnect with foil tape or a clamp — never screws. A sheet-metal screw tip standing inside the duct sits in the airstream catching lint, and the clog rebuilds itself in that exact spot.
- Use the fact that it is out. Vacuum behind and under the machine — the lint that lives back there is the other half of the problem. And if the flexible duct is white vinyl or thin corrugated foil, swap it for rigid or semi-rigid metal, as short and as straight as the space allows.
When you are done, plug it back in, run the dryer a few minutes on air-only, and go look at the hood outside: the flapper should push open on its own. If it doesn’t, the blockage is still in there — and at that point you are no longer dealing with a short run.
Where it stops being your job — and where it stops being ours
Some runs are not a hardware-store brush job: the ones that climb inside a wall, the ones that cross a ceiling to a roof cap, the long ones with three or four elbows, and the ones with a booster fan partway along. That is a dryer-vent specialist, with powered rods, a camera, and a vacuum big enough to catch what comes loose. In a building where dryers share a common vertical exhaust riser, everything past your wall is the association’s: ask when that line was last cleaned.
And now the part we have to say about ourselves, plainly. A house cleaning service cleans the room and the outsides of the machines: the top and front of the dryer, the shelf, the floor, and the lint that gathers behind and under the machine where it can be reached. Nothing inside the duct. There is no dryer-vent line on the JAS booking menu because JAS does not sell that work — it belongs to another trade, like the rest of the “no” list we lay out in what a house cleaning service will not do.
What we do publish is everything next to it. JAS’s residential cleaning starts at $189 — a “2–3 hour visit · 2-person team” working “28 items verified by photo” — and the laundry room and the machine exteriors sit inside that routine. If you want the washing handled too, the “Laundry wash, dry & fold” add-on runs $30 per load, “per on-site load; working machines required,” in the catalog’s exact words. That last phrase is literal: a dryer that needs two cycles charges you for the same load twice, no matter who runs it.
This is the dry half of the laundry room. The other half has its own article: how to clean a front-load washer that smells like mildew, where the door left ajar between loads does the same job airflow does here. And if what you want is the schedule for the laundry rather than for the machines, that lives in how often to wash sheets and towels — with one fact that ties the two together: a towel that never fully dries goes musty days sooner, and what decides whether it dries is, once again, the air.
FAQ
Do dryer sheets really coat the lint screen?
Run tap water onto the screen and watch. A clean mesh lets the water fall straight through; a filmed one holds it in beads or lets it pool. That film is why the monthly soap-and-water wash exists — you are not washing off lint you can see, you are washing off the residue you cannot. Whether you keep using sheets and softener is your call; washing the screen monthly is the part that keeps the airflow honest either way.
Once a year for the duct — even for a small household?
Once a year is the floor, not the target. A household running several loads a day, a home with shedding pets, or a long run with several elbows earns it sooner. The honest trigger is behavioral rather than calendar-based: a clean screen, clean sensor bars, and loads that still need two cycles means the restriction is downstream of the machine — that is the duct telling you it is time, whatever the calendar says.
My dryer is in a condo laundry closet — who owns the line?
Your part runs from the back of the dryer to the wall, and if your unit vents straight out through an exterior wall behind it, the whole run is usually short enough to brush yourself. In buildings where dryers share a common exhaust riser, everything past your wall belongs to the building — ask the property manager or the association when that line was last cleaned, because no amount of work at your end fixes a packed riser.