Meet the Team

Some vents can't be cleaned back to working condition, and we say so on the spot. Flex duct that's been crushed behind a dryer for fifteen years, a run with a sag full of hardened lint paste, foil hose that tears when the brush touches it. Those don't come back with a cleaning. We'll show you what we're looking at, tell you whether the line should be repaired or replaced with rigid pipe, and we won't charge you to run a brush through something that's already failed. The reverse happens too. If you call because loads are slow and we pull the hood and find a clear duct with good airflow, we tell you the vent isn't the problem and point at the dryer or the circuit instead.

Berkeley housing makes this work specific. Pre-1940 flatland homes, hillside places on steep grades, postwar tract blocks along the bay, and denser multifamily near the bay plain and the transit corridors: almost none of them were framed with a laundry appliance in mind. Washers and dryers got added into basements, back porches, kitchen corners, garage bays and converted closets decades later, so the vent run is an afterthought: long horizontal pulls through joist bays, elbows around a foundation wall, or a vertical climb from a basement to a rim-joist penetration. Downslope lots put laundry at the lowest level with the exterior wall buried, which forces the run uphill or out through a crawlspace vent. Marine-layer humidity on the bay side means loads take longer and push more moist air down the duct, and cool overnight temps on long metal runs condense that moisture inland of the hood, where it binds lint into damp paste instead of letting it blow clear. Over the hills in Orinda and Lafayette the problem flips: hot dry summers and heavy oak and grass pollen pack the hood and screen from the outside.

On site we check airflow at the hood before we start, so there's a number to compare against. Then a rotary brush on a flexible line goes through the duct, driven from whichever end gives us the better approach, with a vacuum at the opening catching what comes loose. We clear the hood and the flapper, pull the screen if one was added, and check airflow again at the end. We work behind stacked units in closets, gas and electric dryers, pedestal washers, and runs we have to reach from a crawlspace on our backs. What moves the cost on a dryer vent job here is run length, how many elbows are in it, whether the termination is reachable from the ground or up a slope, and whether the dryer has to come out of a tight closet to get at the connection. A short garage run through a side wall is a different job than a basement line climbing to a rim joist. If we think the line is due for an inspection rather than a cleaning, we'll tell you that instead.