Did anyone have an interest in dryer vents growing up?

[fan-of-fans]

I was always a bit interested in them as a kid, especially the different kinds of hoods and louvers that were on the outside. And also being able to know whether the dryer was running or not by hearing the whir from outside or seeing the flapper open.

Even now I kind of enjoy walking down the street and smelling fabric softener from a dryer exhaust in the air.

Another thing I often found relaxing for some reason is doing laundry at night. When I would visit my grandparents, sometimes my grandma would be folding laundry or starting a wash load after dinner in the laundry room. Probably still does. For some reason working in the laundry room at night was relaxing or intriguing to me, especially in the winter months. Even now I like to fold laundry or unload the dryer at night more so than in the day.

I'm not sure why.

 

[re563]

Same here

Having grown up in the north, it was always very comforting to see the exhaust coming from a dryer vent in the winter. I remember playing outside in the snow and seeing my mothers dryer vent and neighbors vents blowing out the "smoke" on a winter afternoon, That would make me go inside and take a nap, listening to the sound of the zippers and buttons hit the drum. Still is a very comforting sound that lulls me into a deep sleep.

 

[wayupnorth]

Yes, I too was watching dryer vents in my neighbors houses. Those neighbors that had 8-18 kids put vapor out constantly in the winter. Our Bendix gas dryer did not have a lint screen and I had to clean the lint at the end of that Laundro-vent on the ground in the spring.

 

[yogitunes]

i was always interested in seeing laundry rooms and their setups and plumbing connections....

especially liked the sound of a washer draining into a sink/tub....

doing laundry has always been a calming comfort....if I ever get stressed, I start a few loads....not sure exactly, but sometimes I think its the sound of the machines that soothes the soul...

then again, were in our own little world....

 

[70skid]

Calming Machinery

The homes of infants in the 1950s-1970s were often filled with the sounds of marvelous machinery that didn’t exist for the preceding thousands of years of human history. Humming fans, washers swishing and spinning, dryers and blowers.....

I am convinced that this early exposure to these sounds made them associate with ‘all is as it should be’ feelings in many of us.

To this day, I prefer to sleep with a fan of some kind running as opposed to dead silence.

 

[iej]

I remember growing up in suburban Dublin in Ireland in the 1980s and you would quite regularly see steam wafting out of the sides of houses (often the side of the garage, or the utility room) accompanied by the scent of 1980s laundry products - Bold, Comfort Blue, Persil, Ariel and of course, Bounce - something that's all but entirely disappeared in this market, probably due to the advent of non-vented dryers.

I wouldn't say I was ever fascinated with them, but I certain remember them with a large dose of nostalgia.

Increasingly here, due to ultra-sealed homes for high energy rating, it's becoming rare to see or smell a vented dryer anymore, certainly in new build. Heat pump dryers have really taken a big chunk of the market very quickly over the last few years too, so even classic condensers are rapidly becoming a bit of an antique.

Because of the climate here (wet) dryers were always fairly common. I remember most households, where I was growing up anyway, had one. Wide range of makes and models - if anything there were more bands in the 80s than there are today due to consolidation.

I definitely remember a lot of Siemens "Lady" dishwasher. Can you imagine any company actually using that brand nowadays !?!

The other ubiquitous feature of 80s (and post 50s but I'm not that old) Irish suburbia was pressure jet oil boilers. They were usually located in a boiler house - i.e. a small shed that was either part of the house, but with a full louver outer door, or a separate shed adjacent to the house. This was to mitigate noise and also fire / carbon monoxide risks. They were linked to the house often with a short run of heavily insulated pipe underground but, they would probably be deemed grotesquely inefficient these days.

I just remember the rumble of those burners being a BIG part of anyone's back yard / side entrances. They were somewhat scary sounding as you'd basically pass a large louver door with a faint glow of the lights of the control visible through it and a loud rumbling oil-fired system kicking in and out every so often. If you're unfamiliar with them, they make a kind of low rumble when running. They ran on a fuel that's basically kerosine and usually ran extremely cleanly. You often had a small secondary chimney as the stack that matched the house, or you'd a stand alone boiler house which could often have had a tall metal or concrete tube stack with a "hat" on the top.

The vast majority of these systems were replaced with natural gas in the 1980s/1990s but there would still be quite a few around in less urban areas. Gas systems were a lot more compact and far less dramatic sounding [this post was last edited: 1/27/2020-13:19]

 

[robbinsandmyers]

White noise in all its forms.....

Is very comforting to me. Whether its a vintage 8" fan at night in my bedroom, the washer humming doing a load of clothes or the dryer finishing them up. My bedroom is above the W&D setup in the basement and the dryer doing the last load when Im in bed doesnt bother me a bit. When I lived in a row house on the second floor the washer was in the kitchen and it was very soothing while I was on the computer. Even though it was a new 2006 GE and fell apart by the time I moved 6 years later.

 

[iej]

I have a bit of tinnitus so I actually tend to sleep with a Dyson fan / filter running.

 

[jamiel]

I remember there were lots of different brands...in those days always aluminum out the side of the basement. We had a Billy Penn...think some neighbors had a Sears Homart; only in the last 20 years have the louvred plastic ones become a "thing"

 

[tolivac]

Glad I am not the only one that sleeps with a fan going.

 

[daveamkrayoguy]

There was one sticking out of a wall of a house or building I seemed to always go by that I had a dream bees were swarming out of...

The top-40 hit of the day went from “Heart Of Gold” (Neil Young) to “A Horse With No Name” (America), playing at the time...

I forgot what all the major brands of dryer vents were, I left my parents’’ house with a brown plastic ACE vent sticking out... And mine, I think, is some silver metal no-name...

— Dave

 

[DADoES]

Sleeping noise ...

 
I grew up with window units.  Accustomed to the background sound, I must have something similar to sleep well along with the air circulation.  Ceiling fan on high or a small floor fan.

 

[DADoES]

 
Regards to dryer vents ... only to the extent that dad sometimes got us kids a refrigerator box or some such to make a clubhouse, and in the winter on the patio I'd cut a hole for the dryer exhaust to blow in for heat.

 

[estesguy]

What dryer vent?

My parents moved into a brand new home in 1958, that had a full unfinished basement. They just ran the 1954 GE with no venting whatsoever. It just blew up against the concrete wall behind it. I was only 5 at the time, so obviously I had no idea what was going on. It wasn't until I was mid teens that I actually vented it outside for them with a standard aluminum deflecto vent. By that time they were using a 1967 Soft Heat 600 BOL Kenmore that lasted 40+ yrs with my dad doing a few minor repairs on it, belts etc.

 

[wayupnorth]

When I was a kid, everyones dryer vents went outside. But in the winter here, its like an open window. My new Maytag dryer in 1984 was vented outside and once I forgot to hit the start button. Next morning everything was froze solid. Now I have a window unit that goes in and out and it still streams vapor and no more energy hog.

 

[gusherb]

Dryer vents and Chimneys/flue pipes. As a kid I would stare out the window or even sit outside and watch the steam billowing out of them. Nowadays alot of people have gone to HE furnaces otherwise I might still be doing the same thing......actually if I'm sitting in the living room at home I can see the steam from the furnace exhaust on the side of the house rushing past the window. The dryer vent is under the porch so it's not very interesting except sometimes the steam will rise up through the deck boards and look like fog on the porch. 

 

[iej]

I remember our dryer in the late 1980s was just vented into a piece of heavy PVC pipe similar to what you'd use for a drain. It just had a smooth curve that pointed it down towards the ground and no external grill or louvers, so lint didn't accumulate.

I don't remember it ever causing any particular problems but I do remember my dad used to pull the dryer out and use a large (usually brand new unused) floor mop to clean out the flexible ducts and you'd get a big cloud of lint blowing into the yard. Very effective!