Least efficient household thing?

[johnridley]

A post on another LJ got me to thinking; what's the least efficient thing in the house?

Clothes dryers have to be up there. We use ours primarily in the winter when line drying isn't an option. During the winter, this stupid thing takes interior air that we've already paid to heat, heats it more, shoves it through wet clothes, then takes hot, moist air which we could really use in the cold, dry house, and just vents it outside, causing cold, dry air to be pulled back into the house.

Seems like we could do better. We've got hot air coming from the furnace that has NOT gone through combustion so doesn't have CO and the like in it; if we used that to dry clothes, we wouldn't lose the heat, and we'd be able to turn off the humidifier. It'd be hard to set up though.

Lots of the ideas that I have for this kind of stuff winds up being impractical because they involve integration of lots of different systems. People like having a box they can buy and it just deals with drying clothes. Having to build a large system that integrates clothes drying with space heating is more work than most people (maybe all people) want to deal with.

Others just take up a lot of space in general.

Comments

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

My cousins used to line dry clothing in their house during the winter. Another cousin swore by the method of putting clothes on the line, waiting until they froze, then breaking and shaking off the ice.

These methods do work. IIRC, it worked best to put the clothing up near the ceiling (where it's warmest - duh) and to keep the air moving with a fan of some sort. However, it takes a long time and is seriously labor-intensive. Plus, in my opinion, the jeans never got dry; my cousins just put them on even though they were still a bit damp. People have lived without dryers for a long, long time (they also didn't wash their clothes - or themselves - near as often).

It would be nice to find a way to somehow hook the dryer up like a modern furnace so that it would be safe to vent the hot air that dried the clothes into the house, while the air that burned the gas goes outside. How hard can it be? ;-)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Seriously complicated. Involves heat exchangers. Dryer just went from a simple box with a fire in it to something that will cost 3x as much.
Also the fire right in the airflow probably dries the air significantly making it more efficient.

Line dried jeans certainly get dry. Indoors, probably takes 3 or 4 days.

I'm thinking more along the lines of a sauna-sized room that the furnace plenum vents directly into, then out to the rest of the house, and clothes are hung inside. Maybe even some way to easily bring the different drying lines around for easier loading in the confined space.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

If you had the room, line drying inside shouldn't be much more labor intensive than line drying outside. Certainly more work than chucking everything in the dryer, but not bad.

Our house is so full of junk that I don't know where we'd string a line that wasn't in our primary living area, and I'm not going there. I do have SOME aesthetic sensibilities.

I actually enjoy hanging clothes up to dry. I don't think most people would know, since as far as I can see from looking around neighborhoods, I don't think many people under the age of 40 or so have ever used a line to dry clothes. When I went to Lowes looking for a replacement a few years back, the guy I asked where they were didn't really know what I was talking about.

I know a lot of people don't like line dried clothes because they aren't as soft. However, after comments that others have left on your thread regarding clothing wear, I'm thinking that the reason the clothes are so soft coming out of dryers is that they've been beaten to a pulp, to the point where many fibers have been broken and have collected as lint.

[drsulak.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Actually, your dryer should not be generating any CO - just CO2. Have a baffle that switches between the exterior vent, and a pipe to the furnace. In the winter, when you run the dryer, switch the furnace blower to on...

Unless your house is really tight, running the dryer now and then is not going to appreciably raise the level of CO2 in the house - and you get the nice moisture.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I've thought about running both the clothes dryer exhaust and the bathroom fan exhaust to the cold air return on the furnace. The bathroom needs to be able to exhaust outside sometimes, when the reason for the fan running is NOT because of someone taking a shower...
Both are venting moist warm air outside at the very time when you're trying to get moist warm air inside (when it's winter anyway).

What are the circumstances that cause natural gas flames to generate CO? I know that's a possibility for furnaces.

[min8ive.livejournal.com]

Our washer and dryer weigh the clothes, and only use as much water/drying time as necessary based on weight. The dryer usually only takes 20-30 minutes, even for very large loads.

My mom used to vent the gas dryer into the house in the winter, covering the end with a nylon to catch the lint. I don't know how we survived.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

We pipe the heat inside too. :-)