Solar Powered Clothes Tumble Dryer

[Wallybear]

I have been bopping around on the net today and was looking up the average electrical usage of appliances. The biggest user in my house is the hot water tank. I will be doing a cost analysis on the switch to see if it is worth it in the grand scheme of things around here.

One of the other big users especially for us is the clothes dryer. With 4 kids living at home, the washer and dryer seem to be going all the time. With a clothes dryer using as much as 5000 watts of electricity per hour and a dryer working for 3-4 hours per day 5 days a week, there seems to be a place where energy could be saved.

Clothes lines are the obvious, but in wet and colder climates, this is not much of an option most of the year. I decided to look at the problem and I think I have come up with a cool idea that could theoretically save a lot of energy for the average household.

I believe that if a solar collector was built on the side of a house on a south facing wall. The collector would have to be 8' tall at least 6' wide and approximately 3 1/2' deep. The idea would be to take an old nonfunctioning clothes dryer and scavenge the parts needed. Heck even a good used working one only costs $75. Inside the heat collector, you would remount the drum and rotating motor with belt. Then using the door, you could mount the door on the interior of the house wall. Basically you are using the heat collector to replace the heating elements of the dryer. I think it would be a good idea to pour a concrete floor with a drain in the bottom of the collector so that draining water from the drum has a place to go. A three foot splash guard from the floor up would be a good idea too. The electric motor used to turn the drum only takes about 450-500 watts to turn the drum, so theoretically you could be saving as much as 4500 watts of electricity per hour and in our house that could mean as much as 1kw a weak.

 

[rebecca100]

I could use something like that. We hang our clothes up in the house since it rains so much here esp. in the spring. I am finally going to give in and get another dryer next week.

 

[Wallybear]

If you are careful, you might be able to build it in such a way that you could get 2 or 3 drums in there in a stack form. Dryer where the elements have gone out can be had for a song or even get paid to haul them off if you are lucky.

 

[patandchickens]

I can certainly see where it'd work, at least with a large enough collector area, on a sunny day. (Some quick mental estimations suggest to me that you are *radically* underestimating the necessary collector size, but no obvious reason it couldn't just be made larger)

However, perhaps I am missing something here, but if it is sunny enough for a solar heat-collector panel to work well, is it not also sunny enough to just hang stuff on the line? I suppose maybe when it's real cold and icy out.

With 4 kids living at home, the washer and dryer seem to be going all the time. With a clothes dryer using as much as 5000 watts of electricity per hour and a dryer working for 3-4 hours per day 5 days a week, there seems to be a place where energy could be saved.

Good lord... 4-6 loads per day most days a week? Can I suggest that maybe one TOTALLY FREE way to save energy would be to wash things less frequently (things like sheets, towels, jeans), and another would be to let non-critical stuff hang dry in the house???

Pat, who admittedly has only 2 kids but I probably do 3-4 loads of laundry *per week*, and only use the dryer in the wintertime or in a stretch of rainy weather.

 

[WyoLiving]

This idea sounds interesting.

Where I live, hanging clothes out to dry is an invitation to cloth the residents of the next state! Hello, Nebraska!

I tried it once. The amount of dust in the air from the high mountain desert and gravel roads made me have to rewash all the clothes. They were filthy when I brought them in. And a couple of the t-shirts had ripped where the clothespin were.

It wasn't very windy when I hung them out, but a couple of hours later, the wind picked up and HELLO!

 

[Icu4dzs]

This idea sounds interesting.

Where I live, hanging clothes out to dry is an invitation to cloth the residents of the next state! Hello, Nebraska!

I tried it once. The amount of dust in the air from the high mountain desert and gravel roads made me have to rewash all the clothes. They were filthy when I brought them in. And a couple of the t-shirts had ripped where the clothespin were.

It wasn't very windy when I hung them out, but a couple of hours later, the wind picked up and HELLO!

Dude,
With all that wind I'd think you'd want to get a wind turbine and power your dryer with the juice it makes!
Yikes!!

 

[Marianne]

This idea sounds interesting.

Where I live, hanging clothes out to dry is an invitation to cloth the residents of the next state! Hello, Nebraska!

I tried it once. The amount of dust in the air from the high mountain desert and gravel roads made me have to rewash all the clothes. They were filthy when I brought them in. And a couple of the t-shirts had ripped where the clothespin were.

It wasn't very windy when I hung them out, but a couple of hours later, the wind picked up and HELLO!

I hear you. That south wind you're getting also whips past my place in central Kansas. All that sunshine, but you sure don't want to hang clothes outside.

That does sound like a lot of washing, but I remember how I did an average of 15 loads per week when our three kids were home. Looking back on it now, it seems excessive, but there always was a pile there.

What about humidity with all that laundry? Since we have an electric clothes dryer, I always vent it back into the house during the winter and appreciate the added heat and humidity. Would you vent it back outside?

The warmed air from the collector would be used up pretty fast, I'm assuming that you'd use 'house' air for the replacement air?

 

[Wifezilla]

Where I live, hanging clothes out to dry is an invitation to cloth the residents of the next state!

If you see some size 16 tall jeans blowing by, those are mine

(I have had to retrieve clothes, patio umbrellas and lawn chair cushions from the neighbors on more than one occasion )

 

[freemotion]

I knew a family years ago who had the clothes dryer heated by the woodstove. Electricity made it turn, that was it. Don't know how it was done, as I was young and uninterested in the workings of such things. I did think it was pretty fascinating at the time, though.

 

[abifae]

Yeh, in Colorado it's best to dry them part way outside and then toss them in the dryer to beat out some of the dust and to finish them before the wind has time to catch them LOL.