The attic is often if not always less than a pleasant place. Much like the basement it can be kind of creepy.  Bugs, rodents and other creepy crawlies love to inhabit the attic. You can feel your hair standing on end just thinking about it!

I entered an attic the other day that was kind of...well nice, at first. I noticed almost immediately a very pleasant, familiar scent. I was pondering the odor and looking around when I noticed some very large and numerous...spider webs!?

Hardly an unusual find in an attic, but these were different. First off they were sort of blue in color. Weird. And then there was that odor.

Then it hit me. I went back down the stairway and started looking around on the second floor for...the laundry room! It was located right under those strange spider webs. And sure enough there was the dryer venting pipe going into the wall in a vertical direction.

So the nice scent was dryer sheets and those spider webs, lint! It seems the builder - owner had run the pipe up through the wall into the attic and out the soffit with a louvered vent. Unfortunately the pipe had come loose and was expelling all that lint and moisture into the attic.

A couple of points to make about this method of venting a dryer.

1. Running the vent pipe through a finished wall is not advisable. Especially if it is a flex type of pipe of metal or worse plastic. Rigid pipe is now usually required on a new installation. Even with this type of pipe the seams must be sealed.
2. Terminating the vent in the soffit or worse the attic is again not advisable. The soffit is usually vented and is drawing air into the attic, therefore some of the moisture and lint is being sucked back into the attic.
3. Too many bends and or the pipe being too long are also detrimental and potentially dangerous.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) estimates that 15,500 fires associated with clothes dryers occur annually. These fires account for an average of 10 deaths and 310 injuries and more than $84.4 million in property damage annually.

It seems many people are not aware of the real danger of fire an improperly vented or maintained clothes dryer can present. UL offers some further Product Safety Tips on their web site.

It seems that this attic was not as creepy as most, but it was a potentially dangerous place with a morning fresh scent.

James Quarello
JRV Home Inspection Services, LLC