What's cheaper running a tumble dryer or using radiators to dry clothes?

I have always preferred to dry my washing outside. However, this is not always possible and on those occasions happily dried my washing indoors on an airer.

Initially, I had the airer in our newly decorated spare bedroom where we discovered in the corner on the ceiling black mould appearing. I then moved it to the hall which is in the middle of the house and my husband went up to the loft to carry out some wiring and upon lifting up the newly installed boarding found it was saturated. He told me that the water out of the washing has to go somewhere!!!

We believe that this problem has been made worse by the fact that very recently my husband has put top up insulation in the loft which obviously has decreased our fuel bills considerably but will have added to the condensation caused by drying washing indoors.

Having always been against having a tumble dryer I have now ordered one as I have discovered that there is a new type which are very cheap to run. When taking into consideration how much harder the boiler has to work when drying washing indoors to cope with the damp air I am hoping that this new dryer will make little or no difference to our fuel bills.

Furthermore, it will also avoid all the extra time and money involved in redecorating and replacing items damaged by black mould and condensation.

I never knew so much about condensation, particularly in lofts until I recently researched it following the discovery of our wet loft.

Also remember that a tumble dryer (especially a condensing one which isn't pumping hot air out of the window) will also as a side-effect heat up the room its in which may cause a reduction in heating costs (same effect as the way its claimed that energy saving light bulbs don't save as much energy as you might think as we now have to use more heating to compensate for all the "wasted" energy that incandescant bulbs put out as heat instead of light!)

undaunted wrote: »

Alternatively according to an Npower guide an average tumble drier will typically use about 3-4 kw per hour so if you now multiply that by whatever rate you are billed at you'll get a rough hourly costing for a tumble drier http://www.npower.com/idc/groups/wcms_content/@wcms/@resi/documents/digitalassets/wcms_006124.pdf

Units are kW for power (the rate of use of energy) and kWh for energy - a power of 2kW on for 1hr will use 2kWh of energy (i.e. two 'units').

Having said that, I'm not sure what npower is saying - is the (max)power of a tumble drier 3-4kW, or are they saying they use 3-4kWh per hour? Neither seem right to me.

I've measured the use of my tumble drier (aaa, condensing, inside so I get the heating benefit) and to my surprise, it used 1.1kWh, for a full load, slightly dried on the line. I measured it again (with an accurate plug-in meter, not an inaccurate Owl!) and this time it used 1.2kWh, with washing straight out the machine after a high spin. I expected much more. I'll measure it again since those readings seem extremely low to me.

As to drying on a horse/radiator/airing cupboard - well each one of those puts exactly the same amount of water in the air. If the damp air then finds it's way to something cooler, then there's a likelyhood of condensation, which can cause lots of problems - I certainly wouldn't do it in my house, which already is dampish in the cold weather (from baths/washing up/breathing etc). A damp room (say >70%rh) also costs more to heat, and doesn't feel as pleasant as a drier room (say at 50%rh) - the effect is subtle, but there's a noticable difference, so I run 2 dehumidifiers in the winter.

My advice to the op is to consider buying a decent condensing tumble drier, and put it somewhere where the heat it gives off is useful, if possible.