Dryer Vent

I need a new dryer, and want to put it in my kitchen. It is going on an interior wall so I was going to vent it through the basement but Home Depot had a Ventless dryer kit. The dryer hose blows into a box of water. Has anyone tried one of these. It looks like it may be a mess besides haveing to keep it filled with water. My wife thought it looked like a good idea because I didn't have to cut a hole in the floor.

My dad put in a kit that blew the dryer air back into the house. It was really moist and smelled weird, but was effectively heat we were wasting by venting it outside.

Ya we're that cheap.

ignorant wrote: My dad put in a kit that blew the dryer air back into the house. It was really moist and smelled weird, but was effectively heat we were wasting by venting it outside. Ya we're that cheap.

yeah, it is wasted heat, but a friend accidentally knocked the dryer vent hose off its bung, and after doing several loads of wash over the weekend, she woke up on monday morning to find some realy organic artwork adorning her ceiling and walls...along the lines of:

Picasso it aint

Oh. Em. Gee.

I've done mold remediation, and that is a sickening sight.

Holy cow.

I've seen heat exchangers which allow some of the dryer's heat to be reclaimed but those always vent to the outside eventually.

I don't know anything about that ventless kit, but we've vented it directly into the house for years without any problem. Circulation is the key.

The water is to help trap the lint. Lint build up is bad. Fires happen that way.

Venting into the house can depend on local climate/humidity. Here in the northeast where I live, it can cause a house to get over-humid. The extra humidity can dampen fiberglass insulation....reducing it's effectiveness. So in some cases, the warm (moist) air can result in wasted energy, since it reduces some of the "R" value of your regular insulation.

In dry climates (where folks often run humidifiers anyway), it can be less of a problem.

Personally, I'd stick with a heat-exchanger to capture the lost heat (already mentioned above).

We used that kit for five years when we lived in an apartment. It really humidifies the place and adds a dryer sheet smell to you home. I had to clean the thing out at least once a week, which wasn't hard, just annoying. And you need to add water almost every time you dry a load of clothes. It does recycle some heat, which is great in the winter but bad in the summer. It's reasonably effective at keeping the lint contained. I haven't thought about those things once in the nine years since we moved, but now that I have, I immediately recall the smell and the color of the soggy crud in the box.

I wouldn't want one in my kitchen.

i wouldn't even consider it unless i lived in a low humidity climate, see nasty mold picture above...

924guy wrote: i wouldn't even consider it unless i lived in a low humidity climate, see nasty mold picture above...

We only ran it in the winter and It worked great. Philly isn't exactly a humid place in Feb. We used it for years and never had a problem. The kit we used had a throttle plate in it, so you could direct so much of the flow inside vs outside. It worked well, until it broke. Then we could never find another one so, We just routed it outside.

On a side note:

Never use plastic dryer hose, only metal.

Probably don't want to vent a gas dryer inside

Thanks for the responses. We're replacing a gas dryer with an electric. Everywhere we went wanted about $250 to convert a dryer to propane and it cost me $35 to put a dryer outlet in the kitchen. Extra heat isn't a problem as there is no heater in the kitchen right now and in nice weather we usually hang the clothes out on the line. I guess we'll give it a shot and if it doesn't work out I'll run a proper vent on my vacation

Wally wrote: I guess we'll give it a shot and if it doesn't work out I'll run a proper vent on my vacation

Sounds like one of my "vacations".

carzan wrote:

Wally wrote: I guess we'll give it a shot and if it doesn't work out I'll run a proper vent on my vacation

Sounds like one of my "vacations".

Yeah, tell me about it. Our last vacation was 4th of july last year, we spent it replacing part of the roof on the garage. Great time of year to be working on the roof, it ALMOST doesn't get any hotter than July.

There is always plenty to do here. We have had about a dozen trees fall in the swamp so among other things I'll be putting on my waders and taking the chainsaw out in the water to try and trim a few of them.

When I was a kid (early 80's) it was during a big "save energy" kick that the Canadian Government was funding.

My dad owned an alternative energy company (solar, wind, water power) and also sold the widgets like weather strip, outlet cover gaskets and shower head water restrictors.

One of the things he sold was an internal vent kit for your dryer but it didn't use a bucket of water.

It was a diverter box that went on the wall and had a flapper valve similar to a car heater air door assebly in it.

In the summer, you switched the valve to vent outside the house (or trailer in our case). In winter, you switched it back and it blew the warm air back into the house through a filter. The filter was a lady's knee-high stocking from the drugstore.

It worked pretty well as I recall and didn't make the air terribly humid.

I bet you could just rig up something like that youself. Maybe use that unwanted air filter box from your 5.0 Mustang.

Shawn

Trans_Maro said: The filter was a lady's knee-high stocking from the drugstore.

That's what my wife uses on the end of the dryer hose, in the basement.

My dryer used to vent into the garage rather than outside when we moved in. After a couple years of watching my cars get covered with linty dew, I piped it down through the basement to a small window at the front of the house. I'd never vent one inside.

When my dad had his patio home, a new neighbor moved in and hooked his brand new dryer to the vent tube in the wall, didn't give it much thought. The dryer worked well for a few months then it took longer and longer to dry clothes and finally it overheated.

So Sears swapped out a dryer for free and this one didn't dry any better than the first one. He called the service people up again, they sent a guy out who discovered that the 'dryer vent' ended just inside the wall, it did not go to the outside because that would have dumped lint etc in my dad's back yard. The builder came back and pulled the paneling down (both houses were less than a year old), the whole inside of the wall was full of lint and mold. I think they finally wound up doing one of those lint trap systems and venting the thing through the roof.