Saw a landlord in Philly using dryer sheets to clean his chimney flue

Watched a guy shove a handful of Bounce sheets up a flue in South Philly last week because he thought the static cling would grab the soot, has anyone else run into weird homeowner hacks like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

wood.eric1mo ago

That static cling idea is something else, but honestly it makes a weird kind of sense if you don't know anything about chimneys. The real issue is that soot is oily and fine, so dryer sheets would just smear it around and leave a residue that can actually make future cleaning harder. A lot of these hacks come from people seeing something work in one place and assuming it works everywhere, like using vinegar and baking soda for drains which is fine until you have a real clog. I've seen folks try to fix a squeaky floor with baby powder when the real problem was a loose nail, stuff like that just covers the symptom for a week.

murray.jana1mo ago

So is your buddy just supposed to let the squeak drive them crazy until they get around to finding the real problem? My friend tried that baby powder fix on her floorboards last summer, and three days later she stepped in the exact same spot and the squeak came back louder than before. She ended up pulling up the whole corner of the rug just to find a nail that had popped up a quarter inch.

kelly.hannah1mo ago

The dryer sheet chimney thing is wild but honestly not the weirdest hack I've seen. My neighbor once used a can of compressed air to try and clean out his gutters because he saw someone online use it for computer dust. Took him an hour and he only got like three feet of gutter done before he gave up and just climbed a ladder. People really do reach for the weirdest solutions when they don't want to do the real work. I swear half the time it's just about not wanting to buy the right tool for the job.