Dri Buddy from JML

[David]

Hi there,

Do you reckon this product is an alternative to a tumble dryer, or is just one of JML's crap products?

[Clot]

dehumidifer!"

[Pete Zahut]

can recommend these - they work even in winter, rain or shine. The only problem is if the temperature is below zero.

[Mr Sandman]

run. Worked for about 6 months, its in her front garden now if you want one....

Greeny

[damduck-egg]

available in the 50's and 60's. The Flatley was a box shape into which you hung laundry with a heating element near the base. It may just have been a lamp bulb in some models.

The JML offering does not look as easy to use as the old Flatley but is probably easier to store . As for being an alternative it would depend on how much and how quick you need to dry. It's not obvous from the Ad wether it is purely convection or fan assisted. If it is very quiet which convection only would be, I could see it being useful for overnight drying in some of those small flats that have sprung up over the past 10 years in cities. Trouble is the moisture has to go somewhere so an extractor fan may be needed in todays draught proofed buildings.

G.Harman

[The Medway Handyman]

I remember them! My mum had one. Don't spose they exist anymore? Wonder why?

[David]

[David]

Oops I meant to write dry the clothes

[Cicero]

========================================= Not much drying space, danger of small items falling through rack, expensive to run. Quite useful as a space heater.

Cic.

[Bruce]

Right first time, perhaps?

[Pete Zahut]

Depends on the outside temperature really, the warmer it is, the quicker stuff dries. The beauty of this thing though is that you can actually put stuff out to dry when it's raining and cold, and it still dries! We've had to leave stuff out overnight sometimes but, even though it rained all night, the clothes still dried.

Pete

[David]

Thanks for that. I'll tell my mum and see what she has to say.

Yes I have just turned 14 today :)

[Alang]

A flat we moved into in the 60s had a steel drying cabinet built into the kitchen. Rods in the top to hang clothes off and a couple of sealed bar heaters in the base. Not much cop if you were washing sheets. Okay for nappies though we still hung them out on the balcony in dry weather.

[Pete Zahut]

Well Happy Birthday then :o)

[Dave Liquorice]

No it's the relative humidity not the absolute temperature that enables the clothes to dry. It could be 40C but 100% RH and your clothes would never dry, conversly it could be 4C - 10% RH and your clothes will dry very quickly.

[meow2222]

Thats the one. These sort of things were sold before tumble dryers took over. The flatley produced clothes that were stiff as cardboard, and consequently rough on the skin. I saw fanned bag dryers installed as late as the 80s in low end accommodation.

View the jml as an obsolete cheapskate alternative to a tumble dryer, with poorer results than sainsburys basics.

Much better:

[Andrew Gabriel]

I take your point, but at the particular combination you've given,

4C - 10% RH, the wet bulb temperature (i.e. the temperature of your clothes) would extrapolate back to about -3C. Now they won't actually drop below zero, but this means the clothes are only 4C colder than the surrounding air, which is less energy transfer to supply the latent heat for the evaporation that it would be if the full 7C temp difference was obtainable, so it will significantly slow down the drying of your clothes. At 10% RH, this effect kicks in below about 8C (the point at which the wet bulb temperature is 0C).

So it's not actually the relative humidity so much as it is the difference between wet bulb and dry bulb temperature which affects drying times. This varies with relative humidity (and is zero at

100% humidity), but it's also this temperature difference which passes the energy into the clothes to provide the latent heat for evaporation of the water, and the larger the difference between wet bulb and dry bulb temperature, the faster the energy will pass into the clothes to evaporate the moisture and the more moisture will be evaporated. Any air movement helps lots too, by both transferring energy from the air to the clothes faster, and by removing the air which has absorbed moisture from the clothes faster.

You can read off the wet bulb, dry bulb, and humidity values from the following chart: