What’s the biggest energy-using appliance in the home? If you say refrigerator, as all the standard literature says, you’d be wrong. Your energy hog is the clothes dryer, but fortunately anyone thinking about zero energy can do something about turning it into just a pig or maybe even a piglet.
Behavorial modification, I think, isn’t going to fly much in fighting global warming and high energy prices, but there’s a limit to ignoring it. Cutting down on the use of a dryer can be done with at least some old-fashioned hanging-out-to-dry drying. Many simple options exist just for indoor, so no one can accuse you of being tacky or violating local ordinances.
One clothes line apparatus could be installed over the washer and dryer. It’s screwed in against the wall and is guaranteed for 10 years – though it could probably last forever. Good for hanging up straight from the washer all those slow drying towels and jeans. Sells for $138. If you have floor space you can go a lot cheaper: $43. Click here for details.
The alternative is more hours with the dryer, which easily surpasses refrigerator costs these days. So much of the tale is in the hours you should be trying to reduce.
While the dryer might be used daily for hour or two, the refrigerator works 24/7/365 and surpassed the dryer cost by running up the hours. Marked improvement in the refrigerator efficiency – less so with the dryer – has however turned the tables.
As blogged before, full-sized refrigerators worthy of a family of four can be had using less than 400 kwh annually. You won’t find a dryer that comes close. The numbers you see at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Canada’s Office of Energy Efficiency point to numbers twice that or more.
When it comes to money, the annual dollar figures you see for the dryer over and over again is in the range of $85 to $95 annually. Energy Star refrigerators are almost always going to be less than that.
Interestingly, there are no Energy Star clothes dryer because the DOE’s Energy Star program says they all pretty much use the same amount of energy. This is odd because elsewhere at the DOE – the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program – shows a huge range in energy use of a dryer. It lists dryer wattage usage ranging from 1,800 to 5,000.
To sort this out, I went to a manufacturer’s site where there was some energy use details. General Electric, which with 3 other companies controls 80% of the dryer market, worked. If you look through their models the conclusion you have to reach is buy cheap. They all use the same amount of energy, so there’s no reason to pay more.
Take a few examples. A General Electric 7.5 cubic foot 5,600-watt 90-minute electric dryer goes for $1,349, while a General Electric 7.0 cubic foot 5,600-watt 80-minute dryer goes for $469 and a 5.8 cubic foot 5,600-watt 80-minute dryer goes for $369.
Figure it out on a cubic foot basis. The last comes first at $63 per cubic feet compared to $67 for the second and $179 for the first. And the cheaper two only need 80 minutes!
You may also want to consider energy source to cut costs further. If you have both gas and 240-volt connections, consider that gas dryers cost more to begin with – approximately $50 more than the comparable electric model, according to the DOE.
However, in most areas gas dryers will cost less to run over their lifetime. Generally speaking, the cost of electricity needed to dry a typical load of laundry is 30 to 40 cents, compared to 15 to 20 cents if you use gas.
You can also look for an edge in a dryer’s energy factor. It’s a rating somewhat similar to miles per gallon for a car – but in this case, the measure is pounds of clothing per kilowatt-hour of electricity. The minimum energy factor for a standard capacity electric dryer is 3.01. For gas dryers, the minimum energy factor is 2.67, and, yes, the rating for gas dryers is provided in kilowatt-hours, even though the primary source of fuel is natural gas.
The problem with this is that there isn’t much of a difference among dryers and the information is not readily available so hunting for it might not make much of a difference in your costs. You’re already got the price of a dryer down to about $350 or maybe $60 per cubic foot and you’re not going to get much lower. However, if you do, spend the savings on clothes pins.
Tags: Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, General Electric, Office of Energy Efficiency