Hi,
I'm pondering this question within the following set of parameters:
We live in Tauranga, New Zealand where we have generally very sunny summers, but damp winters. Humidity is generally quite high (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tauranga#Climate) and our housing stock - including this one that is our first owned home - is quite cheap with poor insulation attracting dampness. We also have a decent burglary problem here, so we're quite paranoid about open windows when we're out. When we're in we don't really like it drafty either.
What I'm saying is that it seems our situation doesn't lend itself to clothes drying inside and we have no covered structures available outside. We also do have a lot of washing due to children in dry night training and a new baby that is probably going to use washable nappies.
So what we are doing now is drying clothes outside and when its raining we hold off or dry urgent stuff over an electrical bar heater. We're considering buying a dryer, but I wonder how much of it is convenience? I expect it to use the same amount of wattage as the bar heater (approx 2000W), probably 1.5-2 times as long, but I can't quite see that we'd be able to repay a dryer from that (at $500-800) over a 10 year lifetime. Power is about 23c per kW here at the moment with political interference being able to drive it into any direction.
We may also decide to get an HRV system installed to reduce our heating bill, which makes the case for the dryer even worse.
Anyone done this calculation? Are there any other revolutionary ways to dry washing inside?
