Heat Pump Tumble Drier

TractorFactor

There is a recent trend towards dehumidifiers being a cheap way to dry clothes.
We already have one of these and can dry a load of washing in 8 hours.  It also has the benefit of keeping mould at bay in two rooms, one of which we dry the washing in (but that's not the reason for the mould).

Elsewhere on the internet, someone pointed out a heat pump tumble drier is cheaper and quieter than some dehumidifiers.  I don't know how much ours costs to run and sometimes it doesn't dry everything.

Someone recommended this one (£479) from John Lewis, but the John Lewis website suggests spending an extra £250 (at £729) could save you £500+ when comparing both machines.  I'm not a fan of Beko (sorry, I am a bit snobbish and see these as the cheaper brand) but our Bosch dishwasher has lasted with no problems compared with our LG washing machine (tear in the rubber seal) and Samsung fridge (some sort of fault kept tripping the electrics), so fairly drawn to Bosch, but if the Samsung one above is the king of them all at the moment, I could be swayed.

We coped okay this winter, although there were days with washing draped all around the house but come next winter, we'll have two babies to add to the mix as well as a toddler who gets their clothes more and more dirty.  With this in mind, thinking perhaps a tumble drier is the way to go.

Does anyone have any experience with them?
Do the machines produce heat when drying (we went on holiday to a place that had a tumble drier.  Came back and the kitchen was really quite hot from the tumble drier!)?
Any other things I should consider?

Savvy_Sue

We have a new-ish one from Sharp. It was a Which Best Buy at the time, can't remove how much but definitely not at the £700 end!

I get on well with it but I can't tell you what it costs to run. 

What I find is that I need to run it twice, emptying the water in between. When it starts it says it needs 3 hours, but it never is: 2nd run is less than an hour and there's considerably less water 2nd time around. That's on the longest hottest programme: I've never bothered with any other.

It does generate heat but not a ridiculous amount.

Loza2016

I have an indesit that I think was around £400. Really pleased with it doesn’t take long to dry. Does produce a bit of heat but not loads. 

I bought mine from boots appliances through Topcashback so got cash back & £15 worth of boots points on top.

daveyjp

From personal experience if you have a need to dry a lot of loads don't go near a heat pump, they can take hours. You can't reduce loadings to speed it up as for effective drying you need plenty of clothes in the drum.  Too small a load and they don't dry properly.

Our heat pump dryer had a very expensive component failure and we went back to a £300 Bosch condenser which dries a full load in about an hour.

The tumble dryer is our most power hungry device and we use it all year round.  My electricity bill for February this year with a condenser is hardly any different to last year with a heat pump dryer.

TractorFactor

daveyjp said:

From personal experience if you have a need to dry a lot of loads don't go near a heat pump, they can take hours. You can't reduce loadings to speed it up as for effective drying you need plenty of clothes in the drum.  Too small a load and they don't dry properly.

Our heat pump dryer had a very expensive component failure and we went back to a £300 Bosch condenser which dries a full load in about an hour.

The tumble dryer is our most power hungry device and we use it all year round.  My electricity bill for February this year with a condenser is hardly any different to last year with a heat pump dryer.

Happy to leave it on overnight so that won't particularly affect us but a good point nontheless.

But it's the way tumble driers are going too - to make them all more energy efficient, lower temperatures (which also reduces the risk of shrinking things and fires) but the trade off is taking longer.

As we haven't had one before, we won't know what we're missing with another type I don't think.