Meet the Team

Air coming into a dryer in Houston is humid most of the year. That means exhaust leaves warm and wet, and the second it hits a duct section crossing an unconditioned attic, it condenses. Houston attics run 130°F+ in summer and drop to near-outdoor temps when a January cold front comes through, so the duct wall is almost never the same temperature as the air inside it. Damp lint doesn't blow clear. It packs into a felt mat that grabs the next load's lint, and so on. Add pine and oak pollen in February through April, Saharan dust in summer, and mold spore counts that don't go away here, and your dryer is pulling all of it through the intake and pushing it into a duct that's already damp. We work Harris County and the surrounding Gulf Coast suburbs, and this is the pattern behind most of the calls we take.

The other thing that decides how your vent behaves is run length, and in this area that tracks the housing era. A 1950s one-story ranch usually has 4 to 8 feet of duct straight out an exterior wall. A 1990s or 2000s two-story often runs up and over through the attic to a roof jack. A modern three-story townhome can hit 25 to 40 feet with multiple elbows. Slab-on-grade construction means there's no basement laundry and no crawlspace to route duct through, so everything goes out a wall or up into the attic. Clay soil moves, foundations shift, and over a few years that loosens duct joints and crushes flex at the elbows where it's already tightest. Common calls: clothes taking two cycles, the dryer shutting off on its thermal limit, a laundry room that smells damp, lint visible at the hood, or a bird nest in a roof jack with a failed flap. We bring a rotary brush on a flexible vent line, a vacuum at the collection point, and an airflow meter we read at the hood before we start and again when we're done, so you can see what changed. We work behind gas and electric units, stacked and side-by-side, pedestal and closet installs, and we pull the dryer and reseat the transition when we're finished.

Sometimes we get there, read the hood, pull the transition, and the duct is clean. We tell you that and we don't clean it. What we will do is show you what we saw. If the real problem is a crushed elbow, a separated joint in the attic, or a hood flap that won't open, we'll say so. That's repair work, not cleaning, and in some houses the better fix is a shorter, better-routed new run instead of cleaning the same bad path every year. On cost, the things that move the number here are run length and how many elbows are in it, whether we can reach the termination from the ground or have to get on a roof for a jack, whether the lint is dry and loose or has gone to a wet mat that needs more passes, and whether we find a nest or a collapsed section once we're in there. A 6-foot wall vent on a single-story and a 35-foot attic run to a third-story roof jack are not the same job. If you're not sure which one you have, start with an inspection.