As the years passed, HDBs became smaller and some HDBs don't get sun. Some folks don't like hanging their clothes out cos the neighbours above them would drip water from their own clothes.
For me, I hang my clothes indoors. Cos my HDB doesn't have much of an area for outdoor drying.
This results in a musty smell on the clothes if it doesn't dry fast enough. Apparently, some form of bacteria causes this smell which some of us know when we dry our clothes indoors.
So typically, I dry my clothes 3 ways.
1. Hang them to dry indoors. Even if I use "indoor detergent", there's a probability of having a smell if it's during rainy weather or if the clothes don't dry fast enough.
It's free. So that's obviously good, but the smell is terrible, and it's not good to go out smelling bad... Duhz
2. I throw them all in the dryer. It usually takes an hour or so in the dryer. Dryers consume around 1000W - 4000W. Many people use them. They may come together with the washing machine or they may be purchased separately. For us, we bought them as 2 separate units. If I use it to dry my clothes, I usually turn it on for around 1 hour - 1.5 hours.
Based on my SP Services bill it's $0.2072 per kWh.
So if I run my dryer, I potentially use between 1 kWh - 6 kWh, which means a cost of $0.21 - $1.24 per use. I wash my clothes once every 2 days so that's 15 times a month. Meaning the potential cost would be somewhere in the range of $3.11 - $18.65, ok the range is quite big cos it depends on the dryer and it's efficiency.
3. I blow a fan at the clothes. I have a fan in my clothes hanging area. It's a cheapo fan. It's noisy. Nothing fancy. After washing my clothes, I hang them, then I turn on the fan for around 8 hours. It doesn't 100% dry the clothes, but it accelerates the drying process so there's no smell. I turn off the fan after around 6-8 hours depending on whether I am at home or not. By then, it's probably still lightly damp, but it will dry up by the next day with no resulting smell.
The fan uses 6W... So I on it for 8 hours each time and 15 times a month. Resulting in 720W.
That's not even the power used in 1 round when using the most efficient dryer.
The cost is less than 20 cents for a whole month of usage.
This is a small fan which I use for circulating the air within the small drying area. It doesn't provide any coolness if used as a desk fan. Most desk fans use around 45W so that's around 8 times more expensive than my cheapo fan. But still cheaper than using a dryer.
We still use the dryer once in a while, when we need the clothes dry really quickly. Like when we do our bedsheets or after a trip overseas, cos there's a lot of laundry and we don't have much drying space so we need to process the laundry and get them dried and folded quickly. But more often than not, I usually just turn on the fan for my drying purposes. There's no real need to have dry clothes immediately most of the time so it really helps with the energy savings every month.
Just thought some of you guys might like to know or like to try out if you have similar issues as us.
Cos previously, we never used a fan and we had smelly clothes for a period of time, then we started to use the dryer more often cos smelly clothes was just a dumb idea. Then I went to a neighbour's place and they had bought a fan which was too noisy so they couldn't use it for their rooms, so they put it in their drying area and they had a good experience doing that. So I tried it out myself as well, with a cheapo fan at $12.50, and it really helped with our drying issues.
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