Laundry rooms in homes come in all types of shapes and sizes. Some are upstairs in an apartment or condo. Others sit inside a hallway hiding behind a couple of fold away or accordion doors. Some are in garages and others have an entire room dedicated specifically for a washer and dryer. Whatever the case may be, washers and dryers are getting so big in size that they take up a whole lot of room. Sometimes, you are squeezing a new set of washer and dryer into a home and you just can’t get that last bit pushed on a dryer.

Why?

Because the dryer needs space to provide adequate room for the ventilation hose to come off the back of the dryer and into the wall. All dryers come with the vent coming directly off of the back of them. This makes it easy to connect a foil vent straight to the back wall that it will be setting up to. However, sometimes that vent hole in a home isn’t always directly behind a dryer. Sometimes it’s facing to the right wall or left wall of a dryer. Sometimes, the dryer vent is sitting up high and even at times behind the washing machine spot!

So what do most people do when this is the case?

The rig the whole ventilation system behind the dryer in a way that takes up a bunch of space or in a way that creates a super long dryer vent being dragged out 5 feet longer than it needs to be. Another thing that can happen is that you smash the dryer vent hose too much when pushing the dryer back that prevents enough airflow or ventilation to give your dryer enough air to heat up properly. This will cause some seriously long dry times and wear out your dryer a whole lot faster.

So what are our options?

Vent out your dryer from the side! People have no idea that you can change the dryer vent hole on a dryer to the side of the unit. If you look closely, you will see that it has a cut to be “punched out” for you to switch it over. The difficulty of switching the vent hole varies from brand to brand. A few of this brands actually require an additional “side vent kit” to be purchased and are sold separately.

For example, LG makes some really nice dryers and you can purchase a side vent kit online for their dryer. These usually run for around $50. Once you order the kit, you have to follow the instruction to set up the vent on the side. Some vents kits require some serious steps while others are pretty quick. With LG, their dryers require that you take the top of the unit off, remove the rubber belt around the drum of the dryer, carefully pull out the drum and giving you access to the bottom of the dryer where you while adding the side vent kit to it. Seem’s difficult, but with the right tools and a buddy, it should go pretty smoothly. I found a video online that shows you each step. Special thanks to my buddy out in Jersey that owns a business for showing me how to do this. Now check out the video below.