Calling EPA: Heat Exchange Can Make Clothes Dryers Efficient

October 10th, 2009 by Susan Kraemer

You knew you keep a fire in a box in your laundry room, right? Not only is that kind of a scary thought, but it’s an extremely inefficient way to dry clothes; lighting a fire every time you turn on the clothes dryer. Lint catches fire all the time. But even worse, that natural gas emits carbon dioxide and is likely the second most extravagant energy expenditure in your home after the fridge.

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We can do something about the fridge by buying an Energy Star rated efficient one, but until now, inexplicably, clothes dryers have not been rated under the Energy Star program.

You have to wonder why there has been so little move to improve energy efficiency in the second biggest energy guzzler in most homes…in a nation that uses 25% of the world’s energy.

Here’s a company that can make a clothes dryer 50% more efficient with a heat exchanger. Hydromatic. So why has their idea not been incorporated into clothes dryers?

A heat exchange system is an obvious energy efficiency improvement for those of us who’d like to reduce our clothes drying energy use, but just can’t get out to a clothesline.

This idea gets the clothes dryer into the same energy efficient camp as other appliances. The DryerMiser is a simple heat exchange device that reduces the clothes dryer’s energy consumption up to 50 percent and cuts drying time by up to 41 percent.

Hydromatic is attempting to sell the DryerMiser as a separate “aftermarket kit” that would replace the heating element in traditional clothes dryers, but that is an awkward way to market a radical concept like this. This needs to be an intrinsic element built-in to clothes dryers.

The company says that discussions have been underway with major appliance manufacturers to offer the technology as original equipment in new dryers…since January of 2008!

The EPA should just start rating clothes dryers under Energy Star, even though there’s not a dimes worth of difference between them now. This would give the major appliance manufacturers the push that they need to incorporate ideas like this heat exchange system into the simple fire-in-a-box concept that we are currently stuck with.

Image: Hydromatic

Source: Dryermiser









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