Japan's clothes-drying bathrooms
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This means if it's raining, we'll have clothes drying in the bathroom, which I'll then need to move out to take a shower. Whether it makes sense to then put them back in to the now wet bathroom with the dryer running I'm not sure.
I don’t shower to wash off dirt; I shower to wash off my own body’s excretions. Which definitely do happen while I’m sleeping (and more so, in fact, because body temperature rises during sleep.)
I can shower, dry thoroughly, get straight into bed… and still, the next morning, I’m sticky from sweat; have BO (that deodorant won’t mask); and my hair is now stuck moussed by my own overnight scalp oils into looking like Goku.
You have that backwards. “People maintain a fairly consistent body temperature during the day which drops at night by around 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. However, some people still feel hot at night due to their unique body composition, sleep environment, something they ate or drank, or other medical reasons.” https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-faqs/why-do-i-get-so-h....
Deeper look: “Core body temperature (CBT) reductions occur before and during the sleep period, with the extent of presleep reductions corresponding to sleep onset and quality.” https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/japplphysiol...
Critically your body intentionally lowers temperature including changes to skin capillaries and sweating, it’s not simply lowering temperature from not moving. So you can wake up sweating even if things where fine when you went to sleep.
With my partner we have complementary heating systems. I get warm in the evening when they are cold, and they warm up after eating which does nothing for me. The difference is radical.
I guess partly due to this I would never spend a day without a shower in the morning. I've never been sick enough to skip a morning shower, even in a high fever (or especially then I guess, due to sweating more than usual). The dirty feeling is just too much to bear.
Try taking your core body temperature using a thermometer rather than relying on perceived temperature.
Caffeine, as a cholinergic, constricts peripheral blood vessels, and reduces bloodflow; and as a diuretic, it also reduces interstitial-fluid retention in peripheral tissues. These effects combine to decrease your skin temperature (or rather, to make your skin temperature less reflective of your core temperature and more reflective of the ambient air temperature); while very slightly increasing your core temperature (and blood pressure! Which is one reason caffeine is bad for your heart!)
Most of your heat-sensing nerves are in your periphery, not in your core. So caffeine, by making your skin cooler, makes you feel cooler (even though your basal body temperature goes up!) to which your body responds by sweating less (even though caffeine, as a cholinergic, would force you to sweat in great-enough amounts. See: SLUDGE syndrome.)
Most people don't drink caffeine after a certain time in the evening; and so at night, whatever caffeine was in their bodies has a chance to flush out — which then suddenly allows bloodflow, blood pressure, and interstitial fluid to wash back out to their skin and extremities — and with that comes an increase in skin temperature, "hot" qualia, and triggered sweating from signalled overheating (i.e. the same reason you sweat from spicy food even though your BBT isn't increasing.)
I tried switching after moving out but didn't find it nice for the same reason you mention, getting the bed all dirty with whatever sweat had accumulated over the day.
My uncle's family kept visiting from America and taking 20 minute showers, which would have been totally fine if they were still in Vermont but used an incredibly high amount of water. He eventually installed a shower timer so his tank wouldn't run dry.
In such conditions, water costs more than mere money. Yes, you can probably afford to shower twice a day, but that would require you to bring in a tanker of water from an already drought-stricken reservoir. Water takes on a moral cost as well as a financial one. There's a famous passage from Dune: "One date palm requires forty liters of water a day. A man requires but eight liters. A palm, then, equals five men." Australia is not quite Arrakis, but in a water shortage extra showers start to feel like an Arrakeen date palm.
[0] See this huge PDF for exactly what that was and how we plan to manage it if it happens again: https://www.water.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/671...
Currently our home's AC is out which has resulted in two showers/day due to the heat. Post exercise is going to at least be a hot rinse.
The irony (pun semi-intended) is my wife has gotten fond of at times hanging clothes in the bathroom during a shower to help remove wrinkles. No, Ironing is better but it's a little less ceremony as well as increasing the overall utility of the water you used in the shower.
I suppose different genetics in different regions might play into that.
I think I wake up still basically clean, not filthier than morning showerers. I am of course a biased observer for that.
I grew up in 3rd world without running water, so I'm not ever going to feel "guilty" or whatever other BS for taking 2-3 showers a day.
It dramatically reduces the amount of lipids in sebum, which is what odor-producing bacteria in the armpits feed on. It's also a recent mutation which has been highly selected for, despite being recessive. Comparable to lactase tolerance.
For me, the latter is much more a concern - I sweat overnight and so want to be clean in time to start interacting with people. If I do physical activity, or it's a hot summer day, I might even shower in the morning and evening.
On the other hand, before I visited China, I never imagined getting so dirty that I needed to shower before bed, or I would be rolling in dirt. The dirt really gets on you in dusty Beijing. It wasn’t what I was used to from the states at all.
How does that work? If you wash in the evening and go to bed you do not wake up dirty. Unless your bed is a pigsy I suppose, but then the solution is different.
Yes.
In fact, the minami-muki (south-facing) places garner a premium precisely for this purpose — much more of direct sun.
My first time staying there I was told regulations make dryers take so long that it just isn't worth the electricity cost. The one time I used the dryer in Japan, my clothes were just a warm damp after two cycles.
I have also used shower dryers. Very pleasant. Controls are outside the shower and the shower was separate from the toilet. I didn't note any issues with lint, however, I had weekly cleaning service that was probably dealing with it.
I've also lived in Japan without a dryer at all. Hanging clothes on the balcony to dry or inside when it's raining. It seems to me that clothes last a lot longer when they're air dried.
Coming from another culture, nobody even remotely think this is a thing.
Seeing multicoloured underpants and bedsheets fluttering in the streets is not an impressive or edifying sight for the clothing owner or for the unfortunate observer. Lack of privacy is dehumanizing.
Under normal circumstances I do appreciate the quick work they'll make of the occasional pair of jeans.
Dryer lint is produced by the abrasion of clothes as they tumble in your dryer.
Hang drying doesn't produce lint. It seems like this is just hang drying but circulating warmer drier air to speed it up.
So I must be misunderstanding something. How is this generating lint that clogs your drain? Why do you have to put a plastic cover down at all? I don't put any kind of cover on my floor when I air-dry my T shirts on a rack after washing. (I don't like them shrinking in my dryer.)
The more useful trick, that I didn't know from home (EU) is underwear drying rack. Small rack on a hook with plenty of clips attached. Back at home, we used to put our socks and panties next to everything else on a big rack. This small drying rack makes it much more effective.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01D4I3RW2/ref=sspa_mw_detail_0?...
Notice that the amount of manual work required with these bathroom dryers is the same as air-drying, but less than tumble drying.
I never had a problem with lint. Like others mentioned, there is a plastic plate that you have to clean regularly, the same that captures hair.
Buy a copper replacement. They get much less grimy than the plastic ones. This goes for the kitchen sink strainer too.
Plastic is a nightmare when I try to clean them. I can't remove filth or stench from plastic no matter how hard I try.
If you clean your drain maybe once every two weeks and it’s fine. Hair from showers and baths is a larger issue.
We all shower in the evening in random order, and clothes drying happens during the day when everyone is off to work.
Whoever showers first takes all the clothes out and dumps them somewhere until it can be folded.
Not trying to say you don’t have issues, just want to give a different perspective.
Quirky Japanese technology is not the solution.
But as an individual who wants to do something, and in principle has an incentive to reduce their energy bill, reducing consumption is the main thing under their control.
If you live far from the temperate zones, just keeping yourself alive costs a ton of energy.
The best thing you can do is making nuclear and solar an issue with your local politics and then voting for it.
There's no way in the world you're putting a nuclear plant on site.
According to that link, manufacturing represents 76% of industrial energy consumption, not total energy consumption.
Of the transportation sector, about 25% is "cars and motorcycles" and 32% is light trucks; however, a lot of that light truck usage includes pickup trucks for private use. [2]
I can't prove it without more Googling but when you put the two of those together energy use of the direct control of consumers likely exceeds that in the industrial sector.
So while this is small beer, switching out your gas heating and hot water for electric heat pumps, insulating your house better, and switching to EVs are a big deal in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention the almost forgotten but huge benefits of reducing local and especially indoor air pollution.
[1] https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener... [2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transporta...
I exclusively dry my clothes on a ~$30 folding clothes frame that will take a full washer load. If I'm in a rush, I point a fan at it.
In the winter, the humidity is welcome and the fan alone dries the clothing really quick. In the summer, I set it up outside. If there's a good breeze, my laundry is dry in no time. If I set it up indoors, the central AC takes care of the humidity.
My electric bill is tiny and my clothes last forever because they're not getting beat to shit for half an hour every week...
Hopefully not wooden - otherwise, I can smell this comment.
They still are though, in the spin dry part of the wash cycle? Or do you not use it?
I do hang dry some clothes at home but at the end of the day, I accept the damage that a dryer does because it allows me to spend a lot less time to clean a lot more clothes and therefore I do laundry way less and spend less time on it.
I did like it for drying out the bathroom quicker so it wouldn’t grow mold though.
If the clothes aren't moving well enough for them or air to move around, heat pockets can easily lead to shrinkage (or 'cigarette burn' holes in high-polyester shirts).
The scenario where after one long round some of your stuff is dry (or even shrunk/damaged) but others are still damp? Probably a sign of an overload or bad load (e.x. comforters + anything but MAYBE sheets tends to be a bad idea...) Or your socks were still balled from the washer and they should be unballed and rewashed b/c they are probably not that clean.
If you are overloading a dryer, I've found it best take some clothes out and -not- overload it if you can. I had a very 'consistent' clothing load and a lot of free time during covid, and more or less 'found' that with my dryer, splitting an overload into two normal loads takes about as long as
If you -can't-, try to do as many of these as you can:
1. Do -not- try to bump up the temp to overcompensate for the load size. If anything you may want to prefer a lower temperature.
2. Prefer shorter 'rounds' of 20-30 minutes, and manually 'rotate/redistribute' the clothing between each round. This way if the clothes aren't tumbling, you are at least making sure there's some rotation. Ideally you're able to get to the thing within a minute or two to check the rotation and re-start to keep this semi energy efficient... This is a bit easier if you're at a 'laundromat' or have laundry as part of a weekend cleaning routine or whatever. The good thing is, this will probably help the overall load finish faster regardless.
3. Per the comment about the socks... have some mindfulness in transferring the overload. At least in the US it likely means the washer overloaded too (I know other countries may have smaller driers vs washers etc), and I have seen plenty of washes where one of two pieces of clothing just didn't have anywhere to let the water out during the spin. Leave those in the washer till you transfer the others, then try to get the water out. Don't wring the clothing, but consider gently pressing it (for a T-shirt, 'foliding' it and a squeeze over the washer basin will do the job as long as you're gentle about it, or you can 'press' it against, or just run it on a spin or in the next load.)
Like wow, you achieved half the energy by doubling the time. What a marvel of engineering.
Just throw the marketing team at the customers ! Tell customers their room is too cold, it's overloaded, underloaded, too wet, facing the wrong direction etc lol
I stop putting dress shirts in the dryer entirely after paying attention to the damage it causes.
Air drying leaves clothes looking almost new after a few years of weekly washing and air drying versus a worn out look from a clothes dryer.
But air drying needs to be done inside or at least shaded areas. The sun is an impressive bleaching agent!
This might be fine in cooler climates, but here in Texas, I'm using AC more often than not, and this would fight against the AC, which seems wasteful.
Point being, when something is done differently in different parts of the world, sometimes it's because a different solution works better in different circumstances.
Given that, I'd expect such a device to be more efficient in Texas, not less.
> gas powered regular clothes dryer
Furthermore, with a standard tumble dryer, you're definitely not just heating a small space. Go look at the outside of your house where your dryer exhaust is and look at all the hot air that it's constantly spewing outside. All that energy is just being wasted.
You're currently down voted, but many Americans probably don't realize that some countries don't allow vented dryers. Vented dryers are standard here and many Americans have never seen anything else. They are indeed terribly inefficient, using the nice, conditioned, inside air once, heating it and then dumping it outside. All the air that is exhausted from the inside has to get replaced with air from the outside and has to be heated or cooled again.
Aren’t heat pumps far more common in America than Europe? Why is it backwards for driers?
Some homes in Detroit don't quite have modern HVAC ducting, instead using 'water circulated' heating. Theoretically they can 'cool' but IDK if I remember seeing that in a commercial/municipal building/school or if that was just a fever dream. That said, some buildings will use a 'shared steam' system (My college had Shared Steam for all the class buildings, IIRC lots of buildings in downtown Detroit have one.)
But those examples are in a specific part of the rust belt.
Up in the far NE (i.e. Maine, NH, etc) the remote areas use 'heating oil' and that may be harder to change; putting NG lines in would be unprofitable, and when the power goes out a heat pump is going to be, relatively, larger capacity drain than a blower on whatever's burning the heating oil. Only way to mitigate that would be an even larger generator, or an even larger bank of batteries.
Which is a long way of saying, 'it depends'. And Heat pumps are 'relatively new' commercially. People won't be driven to replace until the cost of a repair vs cost of a new heat pump unit 'makes sense' financially (i.e. it's possible just getting a heat pump in may be 'cheaper' than whatever repair is needed within a certain timeframe... but to make the determination, someone first has to bother to do the math.)
A/C units are heat pumps. Are you saying yours can’t do heating as well?
We just installed an air-air heat pump at the cottage up in northern Norway. 4kW of heating (or cooling) for 800W of power, all on an off-grid solar system. :)
I think these were very common in new residential construction from perhaps 1970 to 2010. These would then be seen in a lot of the housing stock people would be reporting about. There also tends to be inertia where the same type of system just gets repaired or replaced rather than switching a house to a new system design.
Earlier than 1970, you might less central forced air. That might be radiators or electric resistive heaters in individual rooms, as well as some retrofitted window air-conditioning units.
After 2010, you start to see more heat-pump options but they still were not that common.
First, lots of residential construction is housing tracts done all by one builder and they make penny-pinching "standardized" decisions rather than deferring to buyers to make decisions about their unit. It was cheaper for them to install gas furnaces.
Second, the local energy market made natural gas heating quite affordable and this diminished the monetary value of potential heat-pump efficiency. You might not make up for the extra system cost in reduced energy bills. Also, a gas furnace would likely have a longer operating life than an equally powerful heat pump.
Lastly (chicken-and-egg), the lack of a strong market meant that the available heat-pumps were niche products. There were fewer options, higher costs, and few installers who knew how to deploy them properly. There was also less clear reliability info for a consumer to decide whether it was a worthwhile choice, and FUD from early adopters who encountered those under-skilled installers.
Last year I bought a couple 'battery backups' because the day or two without power was causing spoilage/etc.
Not saying a NatGas furnace is easy to hook up in that case, but the overall 'usage' of a battery slew or generator is going to be far better if it's a winter outage.
Cause, let me tell you, DTE -sucks- and I know people who have gone up to a week without power with medical need for it in very populated areas. (oh bonus points there was a live wire at least once.)
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This truly is the biggest 'missing link' to adoption in my area. We all dealt with the Northeast blackout, we have the dumb stuff DTE does where even some gas stations have generators and walk state gouging lines, so until they can easily 'hook up a power source to their car to charge in an emergency' (i.e. to go up north to the cabin or on a mini-vacation till it all blows over) without it being a PITA and dependent on the state's power infrastructure working...
but I digress;
> Lastly (chicken-and-egg), the lack of a strong market meant that the available heat-pumps were niche products. There were fewer options, higher costs, and few installers who knew how to deploy them properly. There was also less clear reliability info for a consumer to decide whether it was a worthwhile choice, and FUD from early adopters who encountered those under-skilled installers.
Between the Influencer market, The 'SEO Optimized Marketing Video', and every other marketing technique, no player has found a way to just get some competent installer teams in a network? FFS based on my recent experience with furnace repair, it would be easy for them to try and vertical it.
As I mentioned in my original post there's a lot of parts of the US where people do even worse things than natural gas, due to the general lack of reliability of service lines, or abhorrent cost to install reliably. Those places still need heat when the power's cut in a nasty storm and they are days/weeks down on the roll.
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I wager the reliability of the US power network and maintenance SLAs thereof are the biggest hurdle to mass adoption of heat pumps vs natgas/etc.
At the same time I'll note that NatGas -heating- is, last I was aware, still more efficient than CGCC->Heat Pump in my area. Happy for alternative info as we may need to shop soon.
I wouldn't say never, my home in England had a dryer with an exhaust hose in the 1990s.
But since the 2000s, they're not usually seen.
https://izanau.com/article/view/bathrooms-in-japan
It is separate from both the sink and the toilet, it’s often just a wet room with maybe a bathtub.
Of course, clothes can be hung outside for the warmth of the sun, but this seems way cooler.
As you're driving around your engine is already trying to vent heat to the outside, so you're mostly getting the heat "for free". The losses due to extending the coolant loop etc. will be comparatively minimal.
The only tricky bit will be carefully managing thermostats to ensure that radiator won't be melting something is the bathroom, your coolant will get hot enough to boil water.
A "it ain't dumb if it works" variant on that is to literally bolt a box to the top of your hood (depending on visibility etc.), then remove your hood's insulation, and possibly drill a hole to exchange air between the two. Anything in the "hot box" should dry as you drive around.
It should not, unless you are at a high altitude or your engine is faulty. Thermostats on engines target around 90c, but it does vary.
When I lived in Japan, we used air dehumidifiers, clotheslines on the roof, or the huge tumble dryers at the coin laundry. Tokyo summer sun and wind make clothes dry real quick.
Or how few Solar panels there are on roofs.
Kinda feel like Sun Belt states leave a huge opportunity on the table.
Washington has their grand coulee and 145 other hydrodams. Even has some wind farms and nuclear plant giving it the cheapest electricity.
The sun belt states ought to have the cheapest electricity.
Really it’s a mystery why electricity is >$0.10/KWh in all states.
I remember reading books how Electricity would be too cheap to meter.
I have a feel our grandchildren may go ahead and build it. Laugh at how dumb our generation was. “Had everything figured out, just couldn’t will to make it happen.”
Or in winter when we are running our mini-split heat pump to heat the room, we’ll often just set up a drying rack in front of the indoor unit.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Panasonic-F-YHVX120-W-Clothes-...
[citation needed]
What I really want is a dryer that uses the hot air from my AC to dry clothes.
https://storage.topten.eu/source/files/EEDAL15_Eric_Bush_Hea...
I'm not entirely sure how the Japanese solution works, but I'm not convinced by this article to dispense with my tumble dryer. There is certainly a need to reduce energy use and the space washer and dryers take up, but not sure this is it.
That being said, energy prices in the US are a lot lower, so the incentive to lower energy usage isn’t there.
A big factor I haven’t seen anyone mention ITT is that you’re pretty limited on space on the shower curtain rod. You can only hang up a few garments on there. Which makes sense because our washer was quite small, too, but still produced more wet laundry than the shower could dry. Back to drying - you can go and hang up clothes on hangers to use the shower rod more efficiently but that: 1) is really annoying to do all the time, and 2) still takes a lot of time because now parts of your shirt are almost 3 feet away from the heat and circulating air, instead of 3 inches.
The entire setup was very interesting but required the specific bathroom/shower layout and added a lot of friction to my day. Maybe natives have figured out the annoyances I didn’t in my 2 weeks of vacation.
I feel as though America’s “dryer culture“ is based on General Electric and others simply wanting to sell you two appliances instead of one.
Old tumblers aren’t exactly great in this regard either, you have to compare to the modern versions with a heat pump.
Otherwise they can be a nice complement to your drying options. Especially for things like sensitive or bulky outdoor gear for winter.
to get dry, 40+ degree air, i just need to open the window during the summer in the city i'm from! but you might still value it for clothes that can't be dried against direct sunlight.
I mean, it looks to me like people tend to have more space on average in the USA, why wouldn't they want to prefer to dry their clothes outdoor and makes them last longer? Even when I owned a tumble drier, I only used it for emergencies or wet days. I also found out that on wet days a deshumidifier in a large room was still better for the longevity of my clothes than tumble drying.
As for the wear and tear, in my experience most of it came from the washing machine and not the dryer. Older washers with the agitator in the middle wore out my clothes a ton more than modern front-loaded machines, which also adjust wash time depending on load size. Dryers also have humidity sensors that adjust drying time, which is minimal as the washer spins at 1,200 rpm.
Lastly, hang drying also has its own wear if done outside: Color fading from the sun.
In the end it just isn’t worth the hassle (for me).
Normal dryers can do some of this, but it seems heat pump dryers are making the leap.
Blurb - https://www.bosch-home.com.sg/experience-bosch/living-with-b...
The catch is heat pump dryers cost more ﷼