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Phoenix-metro housing is almost universally slab-on-grade with laundry pulled inside the conditioned envelope: interior hall closets, garage walls, or second-floor laundry rooms in the newer north-Valley and master-planned stock. That means the dryer is rarely on an exterior wall. Typical runs here are 15 to 30 feet of duct through attic space to a roof jack or gable vent, or a long lateral run through soffit to a sidewall. Desert attics hit 140-160F in summer, so the duct itself is hot, but the problem isn't condensation. It's fine blown dust and pollen, olive, mulberry, palo verde, bermuda grass, drawn through the laundry area, plus monsoon dust loading the exterior termination screens. Low indoor humidity should speed drying. In practice, a long attic run with four or five elbows kills airflow and cancels out the advantage.

Most of our Scottsdale calls start the same way: towels take two cycles, the laundry room smells hot, or the dryer shuts itself off partway through. We show up with a rotary brush on a flexible vent line, a vacuum staged at the dryer connection, and an anemometer to read airflow at the exterior hood before and after. We pull the dryer, disconnect the transition hose, and brush the full run from the appliance end while the vacuum catches what comes back. Then we go to the termination. Flat and low-slope roofs with tile or parapets mean roof caps are often sealed tight, hard to see, and ignored for years, so that screen gets cleared by hand. We work behind gas and electric units, stacked closet pairs, and the second-floor laundry rooms that make the attic run long in the first place. If the transition hose is crushed foil behind the machine, we'll say so, and you can decide about repair separately.

Sometimes the vent is fine. If airflow at the hood reads clean and the run is short, we tell you that, charge for the visit, and leave the duct alone rather than selling you a cleaning you don't need. What moves the cost on this job is mostly the run itself: a short garage-wall vent is quick, while a 30-foot attic run to a tile-roof jack means roof access, a longer brush line, and two techs. Heavy pollen or post-monsoon dust loading adds time. So does a termination that's been capped or screened over and needs opening up. If the duct turns out to be undersized, crushed, or terminating somewhere it shouldn't, we'll walk you through installation options, and an inspection is the right starting point when you've just bought the house and nobody knows where the duct goes.