Kung Fu Maintenance demonstrates how to run new dryer vent or replace old air leaking hose in super tight quarters.
OK, today I’m going to be running a dryer vent from the top here, onto here.
Looks pretty impossible, doesn’t it?
I’ll show you again how it is actually possible.
OK. Well you’ll have to check your particular codes for your particular area. For me, this is all that fits here.
What I have is some foil tape for this that’s rated for heat use. For heater use that has a high temperature. So you want to make sure you’re not using a type of tape that might start on fire. I’m going to remove all my old tape there.
This is for an electric dryer. I kind of like electric in a lot of ways. Gas you’ve got more possibilities of carbon monoxide poisoning, and all that. It’s more critical that things are correct. We want things correctly anyway.
Here we go. So connecting the top part’s straightforward. We’re going to slide that. OK, so this part’s easy and straightforward. It’s just going to go straight on there.
The tricky part is getting up here, either with a ladder. What I’ll do is, I just put my feet on each end. Basically step up there, and stand in there. And before I do that, I’ll tear off a piece of my tape to get it ready. And pre-peel a little bit from the backing.
And this is the nice thicker tape. A little bit wider. It’s nice to have one really good seal on there.
So now stepping up to the deal here. And this is [INAUDIBLE].
OK. Up and in. Now I’ll just grab to the back.
OK. And I know putting these on sometimes can be just a little bit tricky. Tricky, tricky.
This is practically a flashlight video right here. Welcome to the top of a washing machine and dryer. The laundry center, with Kung Fu maintenance in this corner, versus the dryer. Pretty sure I’m going to win, but you never know. The thing might try to knock me off.
There we go. And we’ll leave plenty of room there. And we’re ready to tape it off. You can see a little tiny tear there. We’ll make sure we get that also.
But the first run definitely more concerned with getting a half-and-half seal between the vent itself. And you can see how I’m pulling the back paper off of the tape. Anyway. Giving that half-and-half seal over the vent, we’re really going to squeeze all that tape down. Make sure everything’s nice and good there. And I’ll probably to do another round of tape while I’m up here.
I’m just going to pull off enough. I might do two rounds here, just because.
OK, let’s get started here. Come on, buddy. Come on legs, don’t fail me now. Come on tape, cooperate. Who’s side are you on, anyway? Are you rooting for the dryer? You should, because you’re going to be there for a long time. Just do your job. There we go. OK. Beautiful.
OK, for sure that’s going to hold perfectly now. It’s overlapped. And where that tear was, I’m just going to strengthen that up and overlap. This is why we’ve got a solid and secure seal. And beautiful, I might add. For the top. Here we go.
Now I can get down from here. Whoa, not like that. Don’t try this at home, or at work. There we go.
I’m down, I’m free. OK.
Now, to show you how we do this. Get rid of all my paper there.
OK. Basically, as you can tell, there is not enough room to go down the side here. So what we have to do is go at an angle. The way we’re going to do this, is we’re going to pull as much of the hose there, nice and sideways. And then right here we’re going to angle this down, and bring it down the side. And definitely easier said than done. I have a little bit that I can tip the dryer a little bit, and that’s fine.
As you can see, slinky-style. Slinky, slinky. I’m going to bring it down slinky-style. There we go. Come on, slinky. Slinky, come on. OK. And taking care not to crush the vent, just pulling it down, little by little. And you can see how I’m undoing it here. And moving that all the way to the back, where we want it. OK.
And the critical spot is when we go through the hole, because that has sharp edges. It’s unfinished metal. So be real careful there. What you can see is we’ve opened the line. Now we’ve got a nice solid line going all the way through.
Now on this side you’ll see us coming through. Come on through, buddy. Pass that through. And being very, very gentle. We don’t want that stuff to slice. If it slices through there, it’s going to be a very difficult repair.
We’ll bring this right to a vent. And we’ll see if we have some more that we can bring on down, and give us a little more wiggle room. Come on down, just like so. And just evenly spreading the love. OK.
We’ll bring it on through. Nice and gentle. The key is not putting too much pressure there. And we’ll slip it on over.
Now some places call for rigid plumbing, so you may have to do that in your area, in your situation. It just depends. This I’ve found is the way to fit, and the way to go.
In ten years I finally had a problem. But then I’ve found a lot of these that weren’t connected properly. So I had to redo them and connect it properly.
To make a good seal, as long as this seal’s good, it just keeps everything going good, and prevents lint from building up inside the controls and everything. It just really preserves the life of the system. If you’re getting a slow dryer, it’s definitely worth having a peek back here. Looking at what you’ve got going on for your venting.
And also you might check where it exits the building. Make sure everything’s clear there. As you can see, sometimes these are a little tricky. Getting them to come up and over. The inset, there we go, and that’s going to be beautiful.
OK, now it’s foil-taping time. Undo enough to make a complete circle, a little bit of an overlap. And that first one, it’s critical to go half-and-half over the elbow, as well as over the tape.
OK, and then we’ll smooth that all on. And you want everything nice and clean here. You could see this one was already nice and clean. If it’s not, you may want to clean it up first so that you have a good, adhering surface to stick to. Because if that is all dusty, and it only sticks to the dust, it’s going to come off after using the heater for some time.
Now personally, I like to tape up all of these elbow joints. This does allow rotation. You can see how that can rotate. That’s fine, but once it’s in place we really don’t need it to rotate anymore. And I really like to tape these in place, just because a lot of times when you turn the dryer on– I’ll even do that now, turn the dryer on– you’ll see sometimes a puff of dust just come flying out of there. Out of these unions, where the turns are. And this one’s actually OK.
Oops, I’ve got my old dryer vent in the dryer. That wasn’t good. Oh well. OK.
I’m going to have get rid of the old dryer vent. It had split, right there, where it goes through. So I probably needed a new one here. Put down a major remodel here. Anyway, to make a long story short, everything’s going to be nice and brand new here. Anyway.
This is just going to make it that much more efficient, not having any air openings right here. One other thing to watch for is to make sure that these screws up top, right where it goes in, are nice and tight. These do come loose sometimes from vibration. But mine are nice and tight there. OK.
And I’m going to have to pull that dryer hose out of there in a minute, just for testing purposes. Even though I did run it inside there already, that wasn’t really a good– not a good thing to do. But we’ll survive.
You know, if you don’t get things right, or do things right, the first time, it’s going to punish you later. It’s going to attack. Alright. We’ve got it on there, now ready to test it for any air leaks. OK. And I’m going to go ahead and pull out that dryer vent. We don’t want it to get dust and stuff all over inside there. It’s definitely full of some gnarly lint there. OK.
And the other items are laundry items, so I’m not worried about that.
Definitely a good idea to clean out the lint filter catch back here once in awhile. It’s got the kidney-shaped deal that pulls out, and you can separate the two halves of this. And if we’re good, we clean all that stuff out once in a while, too. Which I’ll need to do. Don’t want to run my flashlight in there.
OK, anyway. Close it up, and start it, and now we’re just going to feel for any air leaks. And this should just be pushing the air out of there. Ah, beautiful.
No leaks, and we’re sure. Sure, no leaks, just feeling around. Alright. And everything’s good.
One other thing, with these dryers, it’s good to let them breathe. If you have doors that close, it’s a good idea to have louvred doors. If you don’t, and you want to have your stuff dry faster, you might want to leave the doors open while the dryer’s running, so it can pull air in there.
It’s not critical, but you’re going to have to use your judgment. It’s one or the other. If you close it up, you’re minimizing the sound, but you’re lowering the speed that stuff is going to dry. If you open it up, you’re going to hear a little more, but it’s going to speed up your drying. And save you a little energy.
The alternative would be adding some type of louvred doors. Anyway, good to go. That’s how to put the dryer vents on. Nice and neat. Good to go.