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Comment by apercu | Hacker News Reader

My experience with "smart" driers is maybe less positive than others. Seems they typically only have one sensor in a rotating drum, if they "read" a t-shirt they will stop because it's "dry". But your jeans and your towel are not. Or, the sensors become intermittent, so you stop using the "smart" features.

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Even when I have a single blanket, it stops after a few minutes because one corner of it is dry while the inside is wet. I've had many loads develop mildew as a result. For large items even the "bulk load" setting with the max dryness doesn't reliably dry them throughout --- I have to manually put in "time dry" which is only accessible through the app.

Mine does exactly this and it frustrates my family and I to no end. More often than not clothes are not dry and I’ll just end up putting them through a speed dry cycle because that one doesn’t turn off automatically (which completely defeats the purpose as I’m running through more cycles than needed)

For what it's worth, my understanding is that it's generally not recommended to wash/dry different kinds of fabric together.

Yes before drying my clothes I'm sure to blend them to a consistent mush.

I would naively assume the sensor would be a hygrometer measuring the humidity of the outgoing air. What kind of dryer do you have?

It's not naive and that's how many of them work.

Mine has no outgoing air…

Where does the water go?

Into the house, clearly. Hopefully their air conditioning removes humidity too.

Ventless driers typically use a condenser to pull out the humidity, condense it into water, and drain it into the same drain your washer uses. If it's working correctly, the humidity shouldn't be going into the air.

Cool, I learned something. But it also does seem like that would take additional energy(due to the particularly high enthalpy of water, if I remember my concepts correctly) so at least where I am, venting the excess moisture is the most expedient method.

Venting the moisture also vents the heat. A modern dryer uses a heat pump for both heating the air and pulling the water out of the air. Although I guess with lifetimes of the devices and the relative cost of power (or gas even) between NA and EU they might be much more common around here. With an insulated house you also don't really want to have too many holes in the building, especially not ones intended to remove heat.

Or indeed into a container which you then empty

That's not it. The moisture sensor is two strips of metal on the inside of the dryer door that measure the conductivity between them or something.

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