Are you venting your electric dryer into your home during this patch of cold weather?

With the dryer venting into the house all the energy stays indoors. You are drying your clothes and humidifying your house for free.

Interesting idea – here in Georgia it;‘s 45 and there’s far less of an advantage do doing so. But if it gets that cold here, I’ll consider it.

The issue I have is that my laundry room is small, and it’s not easy for me to get to the end of the dryer hose – on either end – to disconnect it. So in my case a least, there’s a logistical burden to overcome.

I figure as long as the heat is on, it is worth doing. My dryer is in the basement. The vent hose goes up from the bottom of the dryer to a fitting in the basement window above. I have to step onto my dryer to reach it. Once there, the hose is easy to disconnect.

I also try to use my bathroom vent as little as possible. I take a shower with the fan off and the door open.

Smart move!

Interesting idea, but not practical with my arrangement. The washer and dryer are in a small closet off the kitchen. I’d have to pull the dryer out to get to the vent hose. But it did give me something to think about. Minus 10 degrees here this AM.

I do not have an electric dryer.

@ragingloli I’ve never seen them but I have heard there are ventless gas dryers in countries where energy is more expensive than here. They are supposedly very expensive Do you have one like that or do you simply not use a dryer?

I do not use a dryer. I use one of these things

My dad built a green house in the basement. He vented the dryer into the greenhouse and used panty hose as a lint catcher.

what did he want with the lint?

To capture it so it didn’t fill the green house up with lint.

Lint is also a most amazing fire starter….raging blaze in minutes.

I was going to ask if it would make a decent mulch, but guess not.

You can put lint in a string bag used to hold oranges and hang it from a tree in the spring. Many small songbirds will use it to make nests.

I would have a laundry room filled with lint if I rechanneled my vent hose, which I cannot do without disemboweling some walls and a bit of ceiling.

@gailcalled GA. I put out a suet feeder full of string in early Spring, but now I think I’ll save some lint for it too. No reason to landfill it.

This is a great idea as long as you don’t use that gawd-awful stinky perfumed dryer sheets. Someone in our building uses that, the dryer vents into the courtyard, and the smell permeates the entry ways.

I hate artificial smelly stuff too.

@ragingloli What is that clever device? It appears to be tuned to collect RF energy in the VHF region. Does it then reradiate into the clothes to speed drying? ;-)

I use the lint as fire starter. I sometimes add a drizzle of used cooking oil to help kick the fire into high gear.

Venting/Lint/Hose, i’m certain those three were Gestapo officers.

You can buy an insert for your vent tube that allows you to block the outside vent and open a screen to vent your drying into the basement. At least, my grandmother had one, 35 years ago.

Dryer lint + wax = fire starter blocks.

Melt, mix, pour into dedicated ice cube trays.

I just did a quick, back of the envelop calculation for the energy a dryer uses and the energy it takes to heat of the air.
I assumed the air flow was similar to a bathroom ceiling exhaust fan of 85 CFM or about 2 cubic meters per min. I assumed the air was at -10C about 10F and needed to be warmed up to room temp. Cost for the dryer is about $0.57 per hour for the electricity and about $0.16 per hour for the lost heat.
Total = $0.73 per hour. If you vent indoors you save that total amount.
If you run the dryer an hour a day in January you will save about $22 per month.

That is a lot of moisture to put into a room in a short amount of time. Couldn’t that be a problem condensing on windows, doors and cold outside walls?
I’m always trying to find ways to save energy, and sometimes in winter, I do use drying racks for laundry inside the house. Even then sometimes the windows can get pretty foggy.
Is that problem not as bad in the basement? Or doesn’t it matter?

I love @gailcalled‘s suggestion for recycling lint. I’m going to do that too.

@wilma It is really dry here. Some people even use humidifiers to reduce the static electricity shocks.

@LuckyGuy It is very dry here as well, and I actually use a small humidifier sometimes, but my electric dryer puts out a lot of moisture in a very short time, I’m concerned about the consequences when condensing on cold surfaces.
Perhaps fans circulating the warm moist air into the rest of the house more quickly would help prevent condensation?

@wilma My basement is large, open and unfinished. The concrete blocks are lined with foil faced double layer Tekfoil Reflective Insulation ~R-11.
A window box fan circulating the air would definitely help. In the winter the energy used to run the fan is “totally free”. All the heat generated by the fan goes into heating your house and directly replaces the energy your heating plant has to produce. Unless you are heating with wood or coal the cost per BTU is similar.

Yup. My dryer is a quarter-size little thing that vents out of an open donut with a lint trap set into its hatch. I love the extra heat and humidity, but my landlord is a little concerned about the humidity because my house is tiny, made almost entirely of wood, and over 100 years old or so. But hey, it’s the dryer that came with the house, plus he’s never gotten the electrician in to install an outlet for my own normal-size electric dryer, so I’m not feeling too bad about that. Besides, I only use the dryer in the winter when the wood stove is taking all the moisture out of the air.