How Often Should Dryer Vents Be Cleaned?

The short answer: once a year is the sensible baseline for most homes, and heavy use should shorten that interval, not stretch it.

The longer answer depends on how your particular exhaust system is built and used.

What moves the interval

Laundry volume. A two-person household doing four loads a week stresses a duct far less than a family of five doing twelve. Rental and vacation properties often see the most extreme use of all.

Duct length and routing. A short, straight run through an exterior wall stays cleaner than a ten-metre run with four elbows to a rooftop termination. Every elbow is a place lint slows down and settles.

Booster fans. If your run is long enough to need an in-line booster fan (common in condos and townhomes), that fan is collecting lint continuously and needs cleaning at least as often as the duct itself.

Dryer type. Newer high-efficiency dryers can be more sensitive to backpressure from restricted ducts, shutting down or extending cycles earlier than older machines would.

Signs you’re overdue

Don’t wait for the calendar if you notice:

• Clothes needing more than one cycle to dry
• The dryer or the laundry room noticeably hot during operation
• A burning or musty smell while drying
• Lint accumulating around the exterior vent — or nothing coming out of it at all while the dryer runs

Any one of these suggests meaningful restriction. Restricted airflow makes the dryer run longer and hotter, which costs energy and shortens appliance life — and accumulated lint in a hot duct is a genuine fire risk.

Multi-family buildings

In stratas and rental buildings, the honest answer to “how often” is “on a schedule, building-wide.” Suite-by-suite discretion means some ducts get cleaned annually and others never. An annual coordinated program brings every suite onto the same cycle, catches the never-cleaned outliers, and produces a completion record the council can file. Our strata dryer vent programs are built around exactly this.

The bottom line

Annual for most homes. Every six months for heavy use, long runs or booster-fan systems. Immediately if you’re seeing the warning signs above.