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

[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. :-)