The search for the most energy efficient tumble dryers

Mstty

Our Indesit Ecotime IDV75 vented tumble dryer cost us £149.99 two years ago.

We previously watched the smart meter tick over to measure cost but we have a Tapo energy monitoring plug now.

It has no smart auto sensing for drying it has a timer and a button for eco or full blast.

Full blast 50 mins for bedding costs 1.25 kWh as it's not heating all the time and has a 5-10 minute cool down cycle as part of the 50 mins.

For bigger loads it works out 1.5kwh 

At the moment we can't justify a heat pump tumble dryer. We might get £50-75 for ours. But if they drop to the £200 mark then we will probably be tempted

red_flump

I have a Siemens iQ700 and it uses less than a unit, as per the comments above. £699 back in Jan 2020, 

Evan3020

Another way to look at it may be that in the winter that heat is not a waste of energy as it is heating the house.

[Deleted User]

wittynamegoeshere said:

We have a Beko heat pump one and it's amazingly efficient.  It's usually less than one unit for a full load, and that's a big load straight from the equally oversized 9kg load Beko washing machine.  Mostly cotton clothes or towels, the sort of thing that does get properly wet.

No heat pump tumble dryer is super-cheap but you definitely save, and those savings are getting bigger with every price rise.  We may have reached the point where it makes sense to replace a working standard dryer with one, lots of maths needed to check this though.

Another advantage is that they don't get the clothes as hot, they use very dry warm air to make the water evaporate.  Traditional tumble dryers near enough boil it away, causing lots of shrinkage and wrinkling.  Also it doesn't make the room very steamy either, you may get a bit of damp from opening the door but that's about it.

Ditto re the Beko heat pump dryer (dhx83420) I got last year.  The product fiche states 1.95 kWh for a full cotton load but I've not experienced this kind of usage even in mid-winter but there again I don't often have a full cotton load and on days where I cannot dry clothes on the washing lines the washing machine spins at its max spin speed of 1400 rpm.  So for me it seldom uses more than 1 kWh per dry depending on the dryness of the stuff that goes into it.  Definitely more economical to run than the old condensor dryer it replaced ( which used 3+ kWh on each cycle).  Agree about the lack of heat/steam generated compared to the previous dryer as well.   

PennineAcute

I have recently purchased a Samsung Heat Pump dryer to replace my old vented dryer.  Two full wash and dries a week added on around 5kWh of elec.  That was around 1kWh for each wash and 1.5 kWh for each dry.  The same wash and dries now only use 3Kw.  Around 76p saving on a rainy wash day.

wild666

If you really must have a tumble dryer consider one with a heat pump, they may be more expensive, starting at around £400. This is the route I'm thinking of going when my dryer packs in but I suspect it will be many years before it does pack in, by which time I suspect they will be a lot cheaper. On AO you can get an A+ rated heat pump dryer for £349 saving £151 

https://ao.com/product/ytm1071ruk-indesit-heat-pump-tumble-dryer-white-76598-126.aspx

Petriix

I recently did the sums for this using my current electricity rates. My existing dryer peaks at 2kW on full power but definitely uses less energy overall on the Eco setting at 1.4kW. It drops to 1kW in the last 60 minutes then runs cold for the final 15 minutes.

140 minutes is enough to dry a medium load when it's relatively mild, but in cold and wet weather it takes a second blast of another 80 minutes. This is because the dryer is in my shed and largely fed by outdoor air - if it was in my house it would use less energy itself, but place extra demand on my heating as the air is vented externally. A condenser dryer would be better for conserving useful heat. 

So between 2.6kWh and 3.8kWh to dry a full load of washing. At the price cap that would be £0.73-£1.06 but at my Octopus Go rate it's just 13-19p (or 20-29p for new customers).

The cheapest heat pump dryers start at around £400. If we assume a generous COP of 5 then we're looking at saving between 58p and 85p per load at the price cap or 10-15p for me. Best case, that's 470 loads of washing to recover the purchase cost or a staggering 2,667 for me.

We do about 3 loads of washing a week. For 8 months they will mostly be dried on the line. Call it 120 loads in the dryer each year. That's nearly 4 years at the current price cap or over 20 years on my Octopus Go rate.

I wouldn't base a purchase decision on future prices; just redo the sums when prices actually change. If you need to buy a dryer now, look at the second hand prices on Gumtree and Ebay. Basic dryers are very simple to repair in comparison to heat pump dryers so the length of the warranty is also a consideration.

For now I'll be sticking with the inefficient heating element. 

markin

Many use a dehumidifier and a rack, faster in a small room, You can also buy tents to cover the drying racks.

Dehumidifiers start at around £150-200.

Mstty

When I see costs of 2.5kwh-3.8kwh for a tumble dryer it does make me wonder if people are just using pre programmed modes. We prefer the know how long the bedding/towels/full load take.

As an example our usage read 4kwh at noon so this included 12 hours of background electricity, hot water heat, washing machine load of bedding, tumble dry of bedding.

Like anything a bit of time spent monitoring energy usage and working things out for your appliances can save a lot of energy.

[Deleted User]

markin said:

Many use a dehumidifier and a rack, faster in a small room, You can also buy tents to cover the drying racks.

Dehumidifiers start at around £150-200.

I know that my dehumifier (dessicant type) uses 0.66KW/hr at full blast and produces a small amount of heat as a by-product.  I know it dries rooms out (kitchen and bathroom) pretty quickly.  Perhaps I need to do an experiment to see how much it would take to properly dry things out and then compare that to getting an equivalent load dried using the heat pump tumble dryer I have.

I suppose another factor to take into consideration is how the stuff feels when dry.  Towels can and do come out hard if dried naturally but feel softer out the dryer.  Makes absolutely no odds to me but SWMBO needs clothes/towels to not feel like they have been left to dry in The Sahara.