EDIT: I’ve attached a rough map of the situation. The laundry room is the little room in the middle. The red dot is where the dryer vents into the garage.
My house is weird. Built mid-1970s. Upper Midwest.
One of the weird/annoying things about my house is the fact that the clothes dryer vent opens up into the house’s attached garage rather than venting outside. This is an electric dryer, so the vent is just hot wet air – nothing like CO or anything.
Ideally, I’d like the dryer to vent to the outside and not turn my garage into a stagnant humid swamp every time I dry clothes (most days, actually, because I have many children). But the laundry room isn’t situated in a way that makes outside venting easy. It’s on the main level, right in the middle of the floorplan. No basement access, so I can’t add ductwork through the floor. No usable ceiling access either.
What options do I have to make this mess annoying? Add venting to the garage somehow?
If you decide to keep the vented dryer, it’s worth noting that humidity is good for energy efficiency in the cold season. Some vented dryers in some parts of the world are even designed with no ducting (the dryer just vents where it sits). Not ideal, but just a bit of perspective. Anyway, this guy explains how and why to vent into the house.
Ideally you would have a humidistat that vents into the house until a threshold is reached, then switches to vent outdoors. If you don’t want a complex ventilation project, it might be wise to simply vent indoors in the cold season and space the loads a day apart, and manually move the ducting to go outdoors in the summer.