Comment by skylanh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skylanh | Hacker News Reader

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My clothes dryer was broken for a time while I waited for a replacement and to install the new one.

In the interim, I replaced the dryer with a chrome (Ikea) shelving unit, a vapour barrier shroud (literally 5mil plastic), and a regular house dehumidifier.

For a full load of towels--or any heavy water absorbing material really--run times were about 2-3-5 hours. Clothing would be brought to the whatever humidity value "Continuous Operation" would cause. In general I assumed that was lower than line drying would cause, but less than line drying with direct sun exposure.

There was some effort involved in sorting clothing onto shelves. But very little real effort. About as quick to shelve and unshelve a full load as... well, doing just that. (10 minutes?)

I would probably avoid this with clothing that rest against high-bacterial load, high-smell areas (armpits, feet). Or more importantly, change my process for washing those items.

It would be a relatively straight-forward process to build a large drum machine based on an industrial dryer barrel, and attach an inline dehumidifier, and then run the drum in an intermittent mix mode.

Maybe this worked for you but this isn't going to work for many people. I'm guessing clothes coming off a chrome shelving unit would look like you put them in a waffle iron. You can buy drying units that use dehumidification. The problem is they take a long time to run and they're expensive and prone to failure. There are more sources of energy than just the electricity that comes out of the wall. How much energy went into creating that heat exchanger? How much energy is going to go into the repairs when the evaporator drain backs up and causes water damage? What about the service on the compressor or a coolant leak?

How many clothes could you possibly get onto an Ikea rack? 10min to rack the shelves but how many racks of cloths? If you were working all day that would be one rack worth per day. Maybe you're doing some sort of minimalist thing but this isn't going to work for a large number of people. There is no way an Ikea rack is going to be able to handle an entire load so you're either leaving most of the cloths in the washing machine wet while you dry each rack or you're running extremely small loads which has its own environmental impact since it's much less efficient than a single large load.

I've seen this a lot with "eco" solutions. When you start counting all the real costs, all of them, like bringing in a plumber because your "eco" solution screwed up the plumbing or to fix the Rube Goldberg machine you've created to save one watt of electricity, or the enormous material costs of your complex solution you find that what you've already got is probably close to the best you can do. I could replace my less than optimal window and it would probably cost me $300 and I doubt I would even see the difference in the heating bill but just consider how much energy it takes to melt glass. I'd be willing to bet it's more energy than will pass through that inefficient window in its entire lifetime.

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