In the course of conducting home inspections, whether it's for a buyer or seller, it is not uncommon to come across flexible dryer vents made of plastic.  These vents are popular, inexpensive, and sold at most hardware stores -- so they are everywhere!

Unfortunately, they can also be highly flammable! As dryer lint is also highly flammable, and somewhere in your dryer there is a flame (or element) generating heat, you may want to think about swapping your current plastic flex hose for an aluminum flex hose or rigid pipe system.

Here's an eye-opening video on YouTube as to what can happen if you have a spark catch hold in your plastic flex hose:

Click Here for YouTube Video

So, after 16 years, finally bought a new (well, almost new) car.  What amazes me is that with the proliferation of cellphones, and the push to have all communications be "hands-free" it only seems logical that the car manufacturers would build-in a place on the dash to hold your cellphone.  Unfortunately, not the case.  

In my last car, which pre-dated the smartphone, I could understand why no place to put the phone - we all clipped them to our belts back then as they were primarily useful for making or taking phone calls.  But now they tend to also act and both entertainment and navigational devices when driving, so it would seem natural to have a place to stick one where it could be easily viewed - a universal attachment point with different heads to accommodate different sizes and styles of phones that charged it while it sat in its cradle.  But I haven't seen anything like that from the car manufacturers yet.

In my last car, I had a gadget that slipped into the CD player, and anchored itself there, making the phone display very accessible -- worked great, although it blocked the volume control to a degree, but not the end of the world.  I liked it so much I bought one for each of my sons, and after much initial ridicule, they now seem to use them fairly frequently (one of my son's girlfriend refers to it as a "dad-gadget" -- so I got one for her, too -- and she seems to use it all of the time now as well).  It does preclude you from using the CD player, but as that's nearly an extinct technology, it's not a big deal.  Over time, it does mess up the rubber dust seal in the CD player, but my car was old, so it didn't bother me.

In my new car, the "dad-gadget" would block the volume control entirely, and I didn't want to damage the CD slot, so I'm trying the type that attaches to the heating/AC vents.  I've always been worried that the small plastic vanes would easily break, but this one seems to be doing the trick.  It uses a magnetic attachment point (vs mechanically gripping the phone like my old model) so not much stress on the vent when detaching the phone.  It's great for navigation (much better/easier/more convenient than the onboard navigation in the new car) and makes hands-free calling much easier.

If you don't already have a "dad-gadget" for your car, I would highly recommend it!  I purchased all of mine (for me and as gifts) on Amazon.com