A lot of articles have been published about dryer vent cleaning and fire prevention. Besides dryer vent cleaning, there is another issue to take into consideration; storage in the laundry area.
Your laundry room is not just a place to wash your clothes, but also often a place for storing a number of things including cleaning supplies, grocery bags, tools and anything else that seems to belong there. If your dryer is in your garage, you may even have some flammable materials and other garage-type items stored nearby. While this may seem to be a perfect place to store things, your desire to have a neat house could also be presenting a danger to your family and your home.
It is important to remember that a clothes dryer is a machine that creates heat to do its job; therefore, anything that is combustible should be kept well away from the dryer. This not only means open and closed containers of combustible chemicals, but also any rags or other items that may have those chemicals on them. Your mechanic is great at cleaning up all the fuels and chemicals he uses after working on the car, but those rags that were being used, which are now soaked in fuels and oils, are a wick just waiting for an ignition source.
Next, you should consider any other items near the clothes dryer. While you may not think things like your dog food bag or the plastic bags from the supermarket are a real fire hazard, just remember the basic premise of a dryer. It heats. That means anything near it is going to get hot. Think of a mess of plastic bags melting to the side of your dryer and that is just the messy part. It is important to remember that a clothes dryer can give off sparks. If those sparks land on cold tile or something that is resistant to heat, that's ok, but if you have papers, plastic bags and other easy to light items in the area you could be setting yourself up for disaster.
Be careful what is stored around your clothes dryer and do not place rags that have been soaked in flammable substances in your dryer, even if they have been washed. Residue can remain; these rags should be line-dried.
Rhonda Nole is the owner of Dryer Vent Wizard, a dryer exhaust specialist who provides dryer vent cleaning, dryer exhaust repair and professional inspections of dryer vent and exhaust systems. Rhonda services the Greater North Bay area of California. For more articles and safety tips, read Rhonda's blog at http://dryerventcleaninggreenbraeca.blogspot.com/
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