If that isn't a compelling title, I don't know what is.

I'd recently heard about heat-pump dryers, I think they're more commonly referred to as "ventless dryers," but I'm not sure about that. I thought they were kind of a new thing, but no, they've been around for decades. Just not so much in America.

Of course.

So I spent some time on YouTube yesterday. (I use an ad blocker, and it seems YouTube's response is to mute the audio about three quarters of the way through the video. No big deal. I just unmute it.) And I spent some time at energy.gov looking at dryers.

I'd originally thought that I'd replace our conventional dryer when it was end of life, but that could be a decade from now. Today, it's about 4 years old and may still be worth a little money. And it'd use a lot of energy in those 10 years.

So I think I'm going to buy an LG-DLHC-1455 ventless dryer. With a ventless dryer, water from the clothes is condensed and stored in the dryer. You can connect a hose and discharge it to the drain pipe, but I don't think I'm going to do that. Maybe we can use it to water plants. Ideally, it'd be captured and re-used for washing clothes, but we're not there yet.

My only trepidation is expectations. I've read enough reviews and seen enough videos to understand that the process is different enough that we might feel as though the laundry isn't "dry" when it's done. And since this is a major purchase, and the old dryer can't live in the house indefinitely while we get used to the new one, at some point we'll be committed to this one and I'm hoping Mitzi won't be unhappy.

The lower temperature is supposed to be better for clothing anyway. Plus we're not exhausting air that we've cooled to the atmosphere, making it up with warm, humid air that we'd have to cool again. So there's another efficiency gain by eliminating the vent.

There is no federal incentive for ventless dryers, but Florida is offering a sales tax holiday on them. If you're considering one, you may want to look for incentives where you live.

While I think it's important to make homes all electric, and more efficient, it's important to remember that if you're driving to work every day in an ICE-vehicle, your greatest energy use is gasoline. So the biggest change you could make to help the transition from fossil fuels is to drive an EV or a plug-in hybrid, and one that is sized appropriately for your actual needs versus your emotional ones.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:20 Friday, 24 November 2023