Venting

Pardon me while I … vent.

The guys who put the siding on my house installed the dryer vent on the bottom. It’s basically a flimsy aluminum tube shoved through a hole in the wall with four flimsy plastic flaps to shut out the weather. It’s not screwed or glued or fastened to the wall in any way. Nothing’s holding it in place except the vinyl siding. I found this out when I started poking at it, looking for a way to add a draft excluder.

I added the white dryer vent on the top. There’s been a hole in the wall for it since we moved in. I guess the dryer used to vent out the top but for whatever reason somebody decided it would be better to add a vent closer to the floor. From my point of view, it’s a lot harder to hook up the vent that way. I have to climb on top of the dryer and reach as far as I can, hanging over the back. I’ve hurt myself a couple times doing that but never badly enough to motivate me to move the vent back up top. I couldn’t figure out how to remove the crappy flapper vent without damaging the vinyl siding, though, so today was the day the vents got swapped around.

The upper hole used to be plugged but the guys who did the siding must have knocked the plug out because there was just a handful of fiberglass insulation wadded up in there. Besides the fiberglass, all that was keeping the weather out was the vinyl siding and a layer of plastic. I drilled a series of holes around the edge of the hole, then cut it open with a Dremel tool. The white vent has a heavy-duty aluminum pipe sticking out the back that slid in as if it was meant to be there, which it was, and four construction screws fastened it to the wall. I had to trim the pipe, again using my trusty Dremel, but the hardest part of the whole operation was moving the dryer, which isn’t all that heavy but is rather large and hard to get a grip on.

I stuffed the wad of fiberglass insulation from the upper hole into the crappy flapper vent and covered it with a piece of extruded foam for now. I’ll do a better job of patching that up when I figure out how to do it without messing up the siding.

Almost forgot to mention: I got voicemail from the guys who did the siding. They wanted to know if there were any jobs around the house that I wanted them to do. I was half-tempted to reply with something snarky, like, “No thanks, I’ve already patched up all the half-assed stuff your guys did.”