There are so many great dryer savings tips. If you’re not implementing them, then you’re really missing out on savings. When you implement these tips, you reduce energy waste in your home. Therefore, you’re saving the earth at the same time that you’re saving money on your energy bills. When you fail to implement these tips, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to green your home and save more green.
First, Try to Stop Using Your Dryer, Period
Fun Fact: The average clothes dryer uses 5000 watts of energy. That’s likely more than your home air conditioner. It is one of the most expensive appliances in the home to operate.
All of the dryer savings tips in the world aren’t as good as just not using your dryer to begin with. I stopped using my own home dryer a long time ago. I confess, I did that out of necessity. At first.
I live in an apartment building. Therefore, I have to pay quarters to do my laundry. For a long time, the dryer in our building didn’t work properly. It would eventually dry the laundry inside, but each load would take four or five times through the dryer. It simply didn’t make sense to feed $10 or more into the machine just to dry my laundry. After all, it would dry just fine without the dryer.
I live in a damp, foggy city. Plus, I live in an apartment. Therefore, line drying outside doesn’t really work for me either. My sister knew of my apartment’s dryer situation. She kindly sent me an indoor laundry drying rack. It’s the number one best present I’ve ever received. I use it all of the time now. It has a bunch of different racks and hooks to easily dry all sorts of laundry in a really compact way.
My landlord eventually did repair our dryer. However, I’ve gotten used to using the air dry method. I prefer it. Why would I go back?
Therefore, I strongly suggest that before implementing any other dryer savings tricks, you try giving up the dryer all together. If you can adjust to not using it, you’ll save yourself a lot of money. Plus, if you realize that you don’t need your dryer, then you might even decide to sell it. That will put a nice chunk of change into your savings account.
Top 7 Dryer Savings Tips
Fun Fact: Drying one load of laundry per day typically adds up to $200 per year spent on using your home dryer.
That said, you may find that you want or need to use your dryer some or all of the time. If so, then you’ll want to use these top seven dryer savings tips to reduce costs:
1. Dry Them Before You Dry Them
In other words, don’t put sopping wet clothes directly in to the dryer. Here are some alternatives:
- Use 1-2 extra spin cycles in the washing machine to help dry thick clothes like towels, jeans, and blankets.
- Let the clothes sit in the washing machine or in an open-air basket for 1-4 hours before you put them in the dryer.
- Dry the clothes on a rack. When they’re almost dry, run them through a short dryer cycle just to smooth out wrinkles.
As a bonus, remember that clothes will continue to dry a small bit as they cool down in the dryer. Let them sit in there, absorbing that heat and completing their dry cycle.
2. Load the Dryer Properly
There are three key dryer savings tips for properly loading the dryer:
- Don’t overload the dryer. The whole load won’t dry which means that you will have to run the clothes through again.
- Don’t underload the dryer. Make sure not to waste space. If you only have one towel to dry, it’s better to air dry it than to pay money to run the dryer.
- Sort your clothes before loading the dryer. Separate lightweight items from heavy ones. Dry the light ones first to heat up the dryer in preparation for the heavy ones. This way, you run each load for the minimum time necessary to get the clothes dry.
Bonus tip: add a clean, dry towel to an almost-full load of heavy clothes. It will absorb the moisture, reducing the total amount of time necessary to dry that load.
3. Clear All Lint
Hopefully you already know that you should clear your lint tray every single time you’re about to use your dryer. If for some reason you have to run the same load through twice (for example, you made the mistake of overloading the dryer), then you should still clear the lint tray between those loads.
Most people do clear the lint tray regularly. However, a lot of people get lazy about clearing their outside dryer vent. This can clog up the vent with lint. When that happens, clothes don’t dry as quickly in the dryer. Perform those regular lint checks to prevent problems.
4. Set The Dryer on the Least Heat
Whenever possible, use settings with the lowest heat. Delicate and permanent press are two great options. You can use them on any lightweight clothes. Of course, you won’t easily dry a thick blanket with delicate settings. However, you may not need the highest heat setting either. Play around with your dryer to figure out the coolest setting that properly dries each load of laundry.
5. Know Your Settings
By the way, if you don’t pay much attention to your dryer settings, now is the time to learn all about them. Some dryers have dozens of different options. Make sure you understand what each setting is and how to best utilize it.
For example, does your dryer have an automatic censor option? If so then you should use that instead of setting a timer. This will tell your dryer to shut off as soon as the clothes are dry, rather than continuing to run unnecessarily for whatever set period of time you may have chosen.
6. Pay Attention to the Temperature of Your Laundry Room
Your dryer heats up the place. Therefore, you want to think about how hot that room gets. More importantly, you want to think about how that affects the rest of your home heating and cooling.
In the summer, your dryer can make the house even hotter. Therefore, you would spend more trying to cool it down. In that case, close the laundry room door to confine the heat to that room. Use the dryer during hours when you don’t mind the house getting a bit warmer.
In contrast, take advantage of the dryer’s heat in the winter by leaving the laundry room door open so the heat will spread to the rest of the house.
7. When It’s Time to Buy a New Machine …
You don’t want to replace your dryer before it’s necessary. However, once it becomes less cost-effective to keep using it than to buy a new one, it’s time to invest.
First, ask yourself if you can go without. This goes back to rule number one: not using a dryer is better than any dryer savings tips you can implement when using one.
If you do decide that you need one then you want to choose a gas-operated machine. Gas dryers are less expensive than electric dryers, so if that’s an option in your home, then choose it.
If you have to buy a washing machine at the same time, then make sure that you choose a side-loading washing machne. This will dry your clothes more effectively in the spin cycle than a top-loading washing machine can. Therefore, you’ll save on dryer costs over the long haul.
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