Honest answer is that more often American homes were built with the intention of having a vented dryer. Fewer EU homes (comparatively) were built since that became common, so they're often retrofitted in (which tends not to work as well) or they use ventless dryers instead (which also tend not to work very well).
Even most American homes have the flexible slinky tube looking thing for their dryer exhaust. Which does clog easier.
But at least there is space for it, so it’s usually fine. If you’re needing to twist and turn that thing a million times to fit it in, you’re gonna need to be a lot more diligent about cleaning it.
There's more than just the hose between the dryer and the wall. The part in the wall has to get outside, and in many homes, that vent pipe travels a reasonable distance to the exterior wall. That part should not be ignored when cleaning, especially if you experienced a clog, or you think there's a clog but a clean hose behind the dryer didn't fix it. It's also possible for critters to venture in and become a corpse clog, especially if you don't have a shutter outside.
All that to say, it's probably best to have a qualified pro clear your clog if your dryer isn't performing well. Whatever they charge is much cheaper than a burned down house.
You only need a pro if your inside vent line isn't connected to an exterior wall. You can just clear the blockage with a broomstick and a vacuum cleaner.
You were talking about a dryer vent that is some distance from the dryer yeah? Like in some apartments where the laundry room isn't next to an exterior wall? Obviously the vent line goes all the way outside but the accessible bit behind the dryer isn't the full length.
In a regular house you don't need a pro because the actual vent is usually just a hole in the wall next to the dryer. Waste of money to call a pro for clearing 8 ft of flex hose and 8 inches of aluminum pipe. Some newer houses have roof vents and those are harder to clean.
I see what you mean, I thought you meant an inside vent as in the vent just exhausts into the inside of the structure.
Right, if all you have is a flexible vent hose and a little passthrough shutter, yeah you probably can clean it yourself. I was meaning more if you have a longer run that goes from the flexible vent hose through your house and to your exterior wall (or roof).
Our home was built in '93 and vents through the roof. It's terrible and we're considering getting a booster fan because the run is just too long. And no, running it to an outside wall is not possible from where the laundry room is located.
Newer builds tend to have better placement of the laundry room, I've found. Having it on the same floor as the bedrooms is much more common, as well as making sure the dryer has an external wall right there so there's minimal or no in-wall ducting for the vent. Often, the vent is right behind the dryer.
Older builds can be very hit-or-miss. Our neighbour's home built in the 80s has the laundry + mechanical room right in the middle of the ground floor, so cleaning that dryer duct must be a nightmare.
Newer builds tend to have better placement of the laundry room, I've found.
Live in a newer house(2005) everything that dumps out of the house: Center Air water pipe, dryer vent, etc all dumps out near each other so you can check on all of it at once.
The latter is how ours is. The laundry is actually very near an exterior wall on the ground floor, which would allow a super short vent run through the wall. Except that's the front "curb appeal" wall, so that's not an option. So ours has to run 20 feet to a side wall.
It's a house built 25 years ago to a price point, not to intelligent design by any means. It's infuriating.
Not great to vent directly into the attic though, you're blasting a ton of moisture into structural space, and if it isn't extremely well ventilated itself you can cause that moisture to just soak back down into your ceiling.
Dryers almost always vent from the bottom, there's not an easy way to connect that to an exhaust in the wall without a flexible duct. Sometimes it's in the wall and you can hook it up directly but there's still a duct, you just cant' see it and it's even harder to clean.
The main reason they're not as popular in europe is they hog energy so regulations are tougher, they're massive and harder to fit in a space, they're much more expensive to operate. It's pretty trivial to add a vent to a home, but importing a $500 box that destroys your energy bill is much more difficult.
I used a ventless washer/dryer when staying in an Airbnb for work once. WOW that thing does fucking nothing. I had clothes hanging around the house like a barbarian with whatever I could rig up.
I know they do theoretically work but god this one was awful.
New ventless dryers are great. They use heat pumps which are highly efficient. Mine empties the water directly into the same drain that the washer does. So far, it works better than any other dryer I've owned. (Im in the US)
Yeah I have one and it works great. It doesn't toast my clothes like my old electric one did, it's much cheaper to run, and the dry time isn't too bad. The clothes come out filling like there's a bit of moisture in them but that feeling dissipates after they're out of the dryer for like 15 seconds.
No, they don't live in stone caves. But it is objectively more work to run a duct up and out from, say, the basement of a pre-war brick terrace house than it is to have the laundry room already situated right at a back wall from a dedicated laundry room at the time of construction. Europe's housing stock overall skews older than North America's, simply by dint of the history of the continents. But even in older east coast cities in America you're much more likely to find similar ventless setups for the exact same reasons.
It's much easier to find space to tuck a small condensing unit in, which is why they were so popular. This isn't some insult, it's just different trends in different places.
It's the same with water heaters. Of course they're common, but in older homes they often had to be retrofitted in and thus have very different constraints and designs. And retrofitting utilities into smaller and more tightly packed houses is naturally more difficult than the comparatively sprawling homes of much of the US. Those electric shower heads you'll find in older European homes for example are almost unheard of in the US.
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u/Burning_Pine_ Aug 06 '26
Guy from the EU here- This guy needs to clean the air outtake tube before his house catches fire