How to Make Your Thermal Exhaust Ports Harder to Hit than a Womp Rat

If our house is the Death Star, then the hot air vent from the dryer would certainly be our Thermal Exhaust Port. While ours isn't two meters wide and located at the end of a laser turret-packed trench, it's still located in an odd spot on the house: inside the garage. Yes, the hot, moist, lint-filled air from the dryer is delivered mere feet away from our cars and other stuff that's in the garage. I'm not sure this idea was fully thought through. So, with the arrival of the washer and dryer, we had to move the TEP so the dryer could properly vent to the OUTSIDE.

With a few trips the local hardware store for supplies and with lots of helpful advice from the guys working there (thanks Weaver's!), we did the following:
1) Removed the exhaust vent in the garage
2) Added a 90 degree elbow where the exhaust vent was in the garage
3) Ran 20 feet of flexible tubing from the elbow to the outside wall where we...
4) ...Cut a 4" hole through the exterior wall's plywood and vinyl siding (I have to tell you, cutting a big hole in the outside wall of your house can be a little unnerving. You can bet I measured MANY times before I cut) and
5) Mounted a new exhaust port in the 4" hole
6) Connected the flexible tubing from the elbow joint to the new exhaust port
7) Used nylon straps to mount the flexible tubing horizontally along the wall from the elbow joint to the exhaust port (don't want too many bends in the tubing were lint can build up - dryer fires, just one more thing to worry about - wee!)
8) And lastly, use some silicone caulkto seal up the gaps between the exhaust port and the wall as well as the elbow and the interior wall in the garage.

Here's the finished result:


As with any projects, mistakes were made and lessons were learned (like once you know of a knowledgeable person at the hardware store, ALWAYS ask them for advice), but in the end we got what we wanted. Here's another view:

Here's an interior view of the outside wall:

The strap is there to provide support to the aluminum sleeve on the backside of the exhaust port that the end of the tubing connects to. There's a lot of unused tubing that is compactly slid on the end of the sleeve that's too heavy for the port to support. Ergo, the strap.

And here's the view from the outside:


There are shrubs around the wall where the port is located, making it hard to see:


And just a few steps back, it's even harder to see:

I like to see you try to hit that thermal exhaust port without the aid of a targeting computer!