Least efficient household thing?
Apr. 19th, 2007 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnridleyA 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 04:47 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 05:21 pm (UTC)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.