How to evict a squatter – part deux
Less than two days went by before my little friend was back setting up a whole new shop in the dryer vent. Apparently, the belly of the Sarlacc did not deter him one bit. Chicken wire is pretty flexible and it looked like he had just muscled his way through it and bent it to his liking. I consoled myself in the fact that my hack job kept him away for a solid day, at least.
I removed the vent cover and played with a few ways that I might be able to stretch chicken wire tightly across the opening, but I didn’t like any of the options. I decided that it had been nearly 24 hours since I had been to Lowe’s, so I should go have a look around.
I came home with a completely new weapon: a vent with a flapper, a hood and a screen.
Now, I knew when I picked this thing up that I was going to have to make some modifications to get it to work. Fortunately, I come from a long line of crazy people that will rig stuff up to fit whatever situation arises, plus I am a man and our specialty is screwing things up, so I was up for the challenge!
The first hurdle was the lip on the back of the vent. I needed to remove it the same way that had been done to the poor old deflect-o SUpurr-VENT. The vent pipe is simply a little bent and is a smaller opening than the lip, so I would have to mount it flush against the brick.
Using my favorite pair of snips, I made cuts into the lip and bent the pieces until they snapped off.
For tougher ones, I used a utility knife to score them, then cleaned the edge up with the knife and a file. A much cleaner job than what was done to the old vent, I say!
Now came the really fun part. The holes for the new vent didn’t line up at all with any of the existing anchors in the brick. I busted out my masonry drill bits and goggles and prepared to drill some new ones. Here, you can see two new blue anchors below the old green ones at the bottom corners of the vent pipe along with a spot where I started to drill the brick near the top right.
If you have ever tried to drill into brick, there’s pretty much no doing it without a hammer drill or a really long stretch of time on your hands. That’s why you see most things anchored in the mortar. But, the size of the new vent wasn’t going to allow for holes that were all lined up in the mortar. Once I had the bottom two holes drilled, I had an idea.
Among the things I keep around “just in case I ever need it” is some metal pipe strapping. There’s no limit to what you can mount up with that stuff. I cut a section of strap and used it to tie down the top edge of the vent to anchors in the mortar above.
I even slipped a bead of caulk along the top edge where the mortar was uneven and might allow water to get in. Now that bird is going to have to tear off the screen and lift open the flap to get in!
Let’s see how long this keeps him out!
It’s like deja vu. That is exactly the sort of vent I used when I had troubles a few years ago. That grid cover looked as ideal to me as it looks to you. But I soon found that the holes were too tiny and clogged with lint quickly. Because my vent is on the second floor and I needed a ladder to reach it, cleaning it regularly was a royal pain. I eventually cut out the middle pieces of the grid so that every 4 small squares became one larger square. That worked better, but the structure of the grid was weakened by my cuts and eventually the thing kept falling off. I felt the exposed giant round flap was far too tempting to a bird, so I took the thing off and went back to a new 4-flap vent like your original deflect-o. The good news about that purchase is that the store sold vents in exactly one color — and it was the identical color of the siding on my house. Amazing!
Good luck… I hope this system works for you.
Btw, your stories had me paranoid about my own dryer vent, so I hauled out the ladder and checked mine last night. No birds or clogging in sight, and good airflow. Whew!
Comment by snadra — March 30, 2007 @ 6:42 am