For six months, I lived with a dryer that required two full cycles to get a load of towels dry. I assumed the dryer was just old. It came with the apartment, it had probably been installed during the Clinton administration, and I figured this was simply what life was like with a tired appliance. I adjusted my laundry schedule to accommodate the double-dry requirement and stopped thinking about it.

Then the dryer stopped heating entirely. I called the landlord, who sent a repair technician. The guy arrived, asked me a few questions, pulled the lint trap out of the dryer, held it up to the light, and said, “When did you last clean this?”

I cleaned the lint trap after every load, which I told him proudly. He shook his head slowly, the way you might shake your head at a puppy who has done something wrong but does not understand why.

“The lint trap catches maybe eighty percent of the lint,” he explained. “The rest gets past it and builds up in the vent line. And dryer sheets leave a waxy residue on the trap screen that you cannot see but that blocks airflow even when the trap looks clean.”

He pulled out a long brush with a flexible shaft, attached it to a drill, and spent about ten minutes cleaning the vent line that ran from my dryer to the outside of the building. The amount of lint that came out was genuinely alarming. It filled an entire grocery bag. It looked like the contents of a sheep that had exploded. This lint had been accumulating inside the vent for years, restricting airflow so severely that moist air could not escape the dryer, which is why my clothes were not drying.

He also showed me a simple trick for checking the lint trap screen. Run it under water. If the water beads up on the screen instead of flowing through, there is residue from dryer sheets or fabric softener blocking the mesh. A quick scrub with warm soapy water and an old toothbrush restores full airflow. I tested my lint trap on the spot and watched water bead up like it was a freshly waxed car. I had never once thought to wash the lint trap itself.

After the vent cleaning and lint trap scrub, my dryer dried a full load of towels in a single forty-minute cycle for the first time since I had moved in. The difference was not subtle. My electric bill dropped by about fifteen dollars a month because the dryer was no longer running for twice as long. More importantly, the technician told me that clogged dryer vents are a leading cause of house fires. That bag of lint I pulled out was essentially a bag of kindling sitting inside a metal tube connected to a heating element.

Now I clean the vent line every six months with a dryer vent brush kit that cost twenty dollars. I scrub the lint trap screen monthly. I stopped using dryer sheets entirely and switched to wool dryer balls, which do not leave residue. My dryer works perfectly, my energy bills are lower, and I am no longer running what was essentially a fire hazard in my laundry closet.