My Story | VentSafe Solutions

I want you to look at these before you read anything else. This is not a stock photo and it is not somebody else's house. It is mine, and the reason it looks like this is a neglected dryer vent full of lint.

The back of a two-story Houston home destroyed by fire, with the roof collapsed and debris across the yard — The front of my house after the fire.

Fire damage across the side of the home, with the roof burned through and belongings scattered in the grass — A dryer vent fire does not stay near the dryer.

What happened

Nobody in that house had thought about the dryer vent. It had not been cleaned in years. It was not on anyone's list, the same way it's probably not on yours right now.

My sister was home with her kids when the dryer caught fire. She got herself and her kids out in time, and I will be grateful for that for the rest of my life.

Unfortunately we lost two of our dogs to smoke inhalation.

That is the part people do not picture when they think about a laundry appliance. Smoke moves through a house faster than fire does, and it does not wait for you to figure out what is happening.

What people picture, and what actually happens

When someone hears "dryer fire," they imagine a scorch mark on the wall behind the machine. Something contained. Something you would notice and put out with the extinguisher under the sink.

That is not how it goes. The vent runs through your walls. When the lint inside that vent ignites, the fire is already inside the structure of the house. It travels where the vent travels. By the time anyone smells smoke, it's inside the walls and moving quick.

A dryer vent fire does not start in your laundry room. It starts inside your walls.

Houston to San Diego

After the fire, I joined the Navy, and the Navy brought me out to San Diego. I have been here since, and somewhere along the way keeping homes safe stopped being something I thought about and became the thing I actually do.

So now I clean dryer vents, myself, one house at a time, across San Diego County. It is not a big business and I am not trying to make it one.

The biggest lesson is that it was preventable. Completely. A dryer vent cleaning is routine maintenance that costs less than a tank of gas. That is the difference between an ordinary week and those photographs.

What I am not doing

I know how this could read. Plenty of home service companies use fear to sell work people do not need, and putting photos of a burned house on a website is about as direct as that gets.

So let me be straight with you. I am not telling you this to rush you into booking. I am telling you because nobody told us, and I would rather you hear it from someone it actually happened to.

If you clean your vent yourself, good. If you hire somebody else in town, good. If you read this page, pull your dryer out from the wall tonight, and find your duct is fine, that is a good outcome and it cost you nothing. I would genuinely rather that than have you book with me out of panic.

Check these tonight. It takes five minutes and costs nothing.

Your clothes need more than one cycleThe single most common sign of a blocked vent line.

The dryer or the room gets hotHeat that cannot escape through the vent stays in the machine.

You smell something burning or mustyScorching lint, or trapped moisture. Both need attention now.

The flap on the outside vent barely movesGo outside while the dryer runs. That flap should be pushed wide open.

Your duct is white vinyl or foilFlexible vinyl and foil ducts are not code and they burn. Rigid metal is what you want.

You do not know when it was last cleanedIf you cannot remember, or you bought the house and never asked, assume it has not been.

And test your smoke alarms while you are at itNot a vent issue, but it is the thing that buys your family the time to get out.

If you take one thing from this page

Go look at your dryer vent. Tonight, before you forget. Pull the machine out, look at the duct behind it, then walk outside while a load is running and put your hand near the vent hood.

Strong warm air means you are probably fine. Weak air, or a flap that barely lifts, means that duct is packed. Do something about it, with me, with someone else, or yourself on a Saturday. Just do not leave it for years the way we did.

— Alejandro
Owner, VentSafe Solutions

In April 2011, my house burned down.