Hello,

I just moved into a house that is 53 years old. It has a utility room with washer and dryer hookups. The dryer vent has a small metal pipe, only 3" in diameter, that leads to the outside. It's also flush with the wall, so that it doesn't protrude at all on the inside. The dryer vent hose is the standard size, 4" I think. How should I go about connecting the hose to the vent in the wall? Are there adapters that would do such a thing? I would think whatever it was, it would have to fit INSIDE of the wall pipe.

Thanks for any help.
-Jim

 

You should not reduce the size of the dryer exhaust. You need to replace the wall vent with the correct size.

 

Any other possibilities? Our house is brick.

 

Actually probably brick veneer (one layer of brick over frame construction). Cuting the brick is easy, especially since you already have a hole. Using a hammer drill and concrete bit drill a ring of closely spaced 1/4"-3/8" holes around the outside of the existing hole and break out with a small cold chisel.

 

Ray gave the correct answer but they DO make a 4X3 inch reducer. It is available at the big box mega-mart homecenter in the same aisle as the rest of the dryer duct materials.

 

Furd you are not supposed to tell him that. Then he'll be back wondering why his dryer isn't drying as well as it use to.

 

I'm not sure if it's veneer. It may be.

I think I'm going to replace the whole thing with a 4" vent. I read the same thing about the 3" making the dryer inefficient.

I noticed the previous owners must've used a 3" hose (the rigid kind) and taped their 4" hose to it, then connected that to a 3" plastic adapter of some kind, then duct taped that to the wall vent. Didn't surprise me. After all, these were the same people that left corroded batteries in the one smoke detector. (They also have a newborn baby girl. But I shouldn't judge.) Anyway, that contraption made me want to do it the right way. We have a contractor working on our house. I will ask him to add it to the list of things he's doing. In the meantime, we will continue drying our laundry outside since. It is summer after all. And we'll save electricity.

Thanks for all your help.
Jim

 

I love the feel and smell of outdoor line-dried laundry. Unfortunately I have lots of birds in the area.

Ray,