Has anyone Tried to Recycle heat from Dryer vent?

[HA HA Budys Here]

Me too but I had mold. Smoked that too...

[tock]

Not really . . . I put a king-size pillowcase on the end of the dryer hose and held it on with rubber bands. Filtered out the dust, added much needed humidity to the dry winter air. Every so often, turn the pillowcase inside out, throw away the dust, and run through the laundry, and it's ready to go again . . . More like a $2 idea . . .

--Tock

[Ken]

I really wasn't going to post on this thread because it seemed just darned silly to me. I'm single and the amount of time I run the dryer is minimal. This topic may be important for large families doing laundry every day, but it isn't very important to me. That said, ....

I may be wrong, but I believe the big energy waste with dryers isn't that you're losing all that heat from the dryer to the outside, it's that you're pumping inside air, heated inside air, into the dryer to dry the clothes, then pumping that air outside. And any air you pump out of the house will be replaced by outside air, and if you live in a cold climate, that outside air must be heated to inside temperature. That's the big waste of energy. So when you kept the air inside, you of course humidified the air, but you also stopped that loss of inside air. Congratulations, you solved a problem you didn't even know existed.

Ken

[BPO]

reusable wire tie and a knee high nylon stocking works great! easy and cheap to replace too.

[Owain]

"lbbs" wrote

A simple filter will not take care of the humidity being dumped into the house, which could lead to a seriously increased risk of mould and rot.

The correct way to do this is to use a heat exchanger. The warm wet air from the tumble passes through the heat exchanger to the outside, losing its heat as it does so. Fresh air from outside passes through the heat exchanger, picking up the heat as it does so, and comes pre-warmed into the house. But the two currents of air never mix. It's quite common to do this (along with colelcting waste heat from bathroom extractor fans and the like) in whole-house ventilation systems in the UK (althoug such systems are themselves quite rare). As many homes in the US have ducted warm air it might be more feasible to make use of this.

Of course, flueing for gas tumble dryers must always comply with local safety regulations.

Owain