Old Dryer Booster Fan

This old dryer booster fan was full of lint!

I was called out to this job as the booster fan was reported as not working during a recent cleaning. When I opened up the dead booster fan, this is what I had found. A few things are going on here. This is a very old style of booster fan that hadn’t been working for a long time. With it not working, the lint built up. The build up like this is a fire hazard in these old fans. The motors can get extremely hot and set the lint on fire.

Another problem here is that it’s not easy to get at the lint in this fan. In order to properly clean the lint out a dryer duct cleaner has to take out a ceiling covering panel just to get at the fan. Then take out the 4 screws holding the fan in place. Typically in a routine dryer duct cleaning, contracted by a strata, this amount of work is beyond the scope of the dryer duct cleaners. It would only be during a through duct cleaning that a cleaner would have the time to work on this properly.

These old booster fans are actually very reliable but they do have problems. Which is why I recommend having them fully replaced with a modern complete booster fan system that I talked about last month. Had a lint box been installed here this lint would have never built up. Had the booster fan not been hidden in the ceiling, it would have been much easier to service and maintain.

In this case I needed up replacing the old motor with a replacement one. Not my preferred option, but in this case it worked.

For more information on dryer booster fan repairs or installations please visit dryerboosterfan.ca

Before you ducts and booster fan get this filled with lint I recommend calling Michael A. Smith Duct Cleaning. MASDuct.com