Vent & Sewer Cleaning

Drier Exhaust Vent Cleaning

We are often asked about cleaning out drier exhaust vents. These ducts are prone to being plugged with lint and thereby becoming a fire hazard. If you carefully clean the lint filter on your drier after each use, there is little buildup in your duct. Unfortunately, Council takes a chance by assuming that all owners do their duty in this respect. We have seen some very badly plugged vents and owners who wonder why their driers are running hot and their clothes are slow in drying.

We recommend that Council:

a. Regularly remind owners of their responsibility to regularly clean their filters after each use of the drier.

b. Hire a duct cleaning service to do the entire building on a two or three year cycle.

In our opinion, cleaning should not be left to individual owners. The same people who do not clean their lint filters regularly are the ones least likely to order a cleanup at their own expense. They will put the whole building at risk.

The job is done with an air jet at the end of a hose, which is pushed into the duct from the outside. Normally, access to the strata lot is not required, unless the duct is badly plugged. The current cost is about $20 to $25 per unit. Put this in your budget every two or three years.

Several companies supply this service. Check in the Yellow Pages under Duct Cleaning.

Flushing of Grey Water Sewers

Multi-story, multi-unit buildings are usually designed with residential units stacked one above the other. Wastewater is generally discharged from each suite in a stack to one vertical pipe, which carries the waste from floor to floor down to basement level. There it connects to another pipe, this one more or less horizontal which discharges the wastes to a sump in the lower part of the building. The horizontal run of pipe is often hung on the ceiling of the Parkade and is installed with a small slope to facilitate the flow.

Gray water is the term used to describe discharges from the kitchen sink, garburator and dishwasher. These flows are usually combined in their own disposal system. Often those from clothes washers, showers, bathtubs and sinks are segregated in a different vertical collector pipe and then combined with the other gray water flow in the horizontal pipe. Waste flows from toilets are kept separate.

The gray water discharge, particularly that from the kitchen sink and garburator introduces solids (food, grease etc.) into the collection system. These may accumulate in the horizontal run of pipe and gradually plug it. If the plug is bad enough, gray water will be diverted back into the building.

Considerable damage can result if this situation is not promptly remedied. We know of a case in which water leaks in a ground floor suite were attributed to the failure of a hot water tank. It was replaced and it was believed that the problem had been corrected. The owner was away when this happened and the fact that the leak persisted was not noticed for a while. The real trouble was that sludge had plugged a drain and gray water was backing up into the suite without anyone noticing until considerable damage had been done. The damages cost the strata corporation about $15,000.

How is this failure avoided? Owners should be encouraged to use lots of water when disposing of solid waste through the garburator. This is not a complete answer and periodic flushing of solids from the gray water system is necessary. The building that had the problem we described above was thirteen years old and had never had the gray water sewer system flushed out. There are at least three other similar drainage systems in the building and Council was quick to approve their flushing.

You can find a number of suppliers in the Yellow Pages under Drainage Contractors.