Drying room instead of tumble dryer

[Arthur]

Hi all. Seeing that the best tumble dryers take more than 1 and half hours to dry

6kg of cottons and then seeing that such a machine will cost close to 500 quid, I'm looking into creating a laundry drying room in the house.

In summer its generally no problem but in winter I'm thinking that the space below the stairs could serve as a drying room for wet laundry. With a removable partition with hinged door and small but powerful radiator it sounds like a good idea. In summer the partition will go in the loft.

. So how feasible is this?

Thanks.

Arthur

[Jonathan Schneider]

Many caving huts have dehumidifier drying rooms and seem to work very well on the amount of soggy kit they dry overnight. A dehumidifer running on Economy 7 could come out cheaper that heating the room.

J> Hi all.

[Ian Stirling]

Not especially hard. You of course need some way to get the moist air out. This can simply be an exhaust, or alternatively, a largish rad outside the room, a tiny 'cold' rad in the room, with a condensate drain on, and insulation so the temp can hit 50C. And a large fan.

[Ian Stirling]

Especially if you insulate the room with a sheet of kingspan or two, so it can easily get to 30-40C with the heat output of the dehumidifier only.

[Chris Hodges]

A dehumidifier's only a couple of hundred watts flat out, turn the humidistat up to _nearly_ max and it'll sort itself out left on all day wuithout costing too much. A small storage heater might be worth adding if you've got economy 7, or a _tiny_ rad or even a metre or so of 15mm on the rad circuit with valves to reduce the flow.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Arthur formulated the question :

I would suggest not very feasible.

To dry anything requires a flow (draught) of dry air. The dry air absorbs the moisture and the flow carries it away - warmth helps it to evaporate.

That's why warm, low humidity, windy days quickly dry washing out of doors.

You have the warmth, but lack the draught and low humidity. What about adding a fan and a dehumidifier to the equation?

[David Hansen]

On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 19:22:03 -0000 someone who may be "Arthur" wrote this:-

Is your objective to dry things in less than one and a half hours, build a drying room for less than 500 pounds or something else? How many things do you want to dry?

If you have high ceilings somewhere then you might want to consider making use of the heat that will gather there naturally to dry clothes via "traditional" airer(s) like

could even recover the heat and remove the water vapour via a heat recovery system like though this will cost rather more than 500 pounds.

[S Viemeister]

I have one of those - different brand name, and it cost less (but I've had it for a number of years now). I find it very useful.

[Derek Geldard]

>

Around here it's called a "Pulley".

DG

[meow2222]

Perfectly practical if you lose the radiator and use a humidistatic dehumidifier instead. For a bit more info on this:

heaters and external ventilation are definitely not the way to go, run cost is many times higher.

NT

[PeTe33]

A small radiator, A dehumidifier

some insulation (if feeling extravagent)

I dry all our washing in a DIY drying room. Had an extra radiator added to the shop heating circuit and made up a bubble-wrap "tent" which goes over 2 clothes airers and diverts rising air from radiator under the tent.

De-humidifier just sits between both airers and the dehumidifier fan gives an effective light breeze.

Bed sheets rest on the top of the tent and and dry from trapped heat. The rest sorts it's self out.

With or without the radiator switched on. (Dehumidifier chucks out enough heat to do the the job but the radiator speeds things up)

Pete

[Huge]

Add some automatic means of turning over the laundry and you've just invented the .... tumble drier.

[Owain]

No, the tumble dryer is a combination of a pebble tumbler and a steam oven. Imagine what that does to your clothes.

Owain

[Chris Hodges]

Except that even a condensing tumble drier chucks out a lot of heat that could better be used for drying.

[PeTe33]

No need to tumble the clothes. They are not all bundled up in a big heap as they are in a drum, all hung on their individual "line" so every surface is exposed all the time.

All heat remains in the building just where it should be.

:¬)

[fred]

Ah, so they just pump out the condensed drying air into the room? So what we need for a compact and efficient drier is a tumble drier that recycles the heated air back to the drying chamber via an efficient dehumidifier. Do none of the commercially available condensing driers do this?

[Huge]

Sans pebbles and steam.

I'd rather consider what having crispy clothes does to your skin.

[Chris Hodges]

The heat exchanger between the warm damp output air and the cool inout air doesn't seem to be that great, leading to plenty of heat and humidity in the room air. A better heat exchanger would help, or as you say some sort of dehumidifer.

[fred]

Thanks, I had plans for an externally vented tumble drier heated via the central heating but the heat recycling idea is attractive, maybe it's time to look at the plans again.