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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Date: 2007-04-19 05:29 pm (UTC)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.