Question: My wife and I just bought our first house. I think that we discovered that our dryer vent is going to require some regular maitenence to keep it clean and able to dry our clothes. 

When we moved in, we found that the vent opening in our laundry room was absolutely full of lint (solid). I got the vacuum cleaner and sucked up as much as I could and reached up and pulled out some more. When she ran our first load of laundry though, it didn't dry much at all. I went up to the attic and looked in our vent up there and there was more lint but not as much. I'm going to pick up a dryer vent [brush](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ea8-Yf%2BlL.jpg) today after work but I noticed that it looked like the tape on their vent was very new looking which leads me to think this was something they regularly had to do. 

I'm wondering how easy / effective is it to get one of the fans to attach to your vent that will essentially *help* it along. I can't think of what the fans are called right now though.

Answer: 
Dryer vents need regular maintenance. Period. No one ever does it, of course, which is why every time you buy a new house, you pretty much need to replace the old vent because no one ever cleaned it out. 

Ideally, you'd clean the lint out every 6 months or so.

A booster fan can help, but doesn't necessarily eliminate any of the maintenance. Plus, you now have another mechanical device to deal with.
Check the vent on the outside. The vent on my house had a screen behind the flap, which is not appropriate for a dryer vent but ok for a bathroom fan. Removing the screen fixed the constant clogging behavior in my system.