Electricity Challenge - In the Laundry

Today I have ventured into my laundry to see what I can learn about our electricity consumption there.

TUMBLE DRYER

Well, obviously I'm trying to minimise our usage of the tumble dryer. They're known to be high energy users.

According to the energy rating label on my 5kg Tumble Dryer it uses approximately 4.5kWh's per load. At a rate of 18c per kWh that adds up to around 80c a load.

I've always worked on a rule of thumb figure of $1 a load because that figure is going to be very approximate and well, saving $1 each time I hang a load on the line *sounds* so much better than 80c. :-)

I decided to do a small amount of research using http://www.energyrating.gov.au/ to see whether tumble dryers have improved in technology (in terms of electricity efficiency) since ours was bought (about 10 years ago now) and was surprised to find that there hasn't been much change at all in this area. The *most* energy efficient 5kg load dryer I could find used around 3.9kWh and the equivalent to ours (by brand) uses 4.4kWh's.

I then did some playing around with figures to see if different sized dryers made a difference by calculating how many kWh's it would take me to dry 10kg of clothing. I used only vented dryers and used the calculations for the most energy efficient dryer so these results are approximate and would vary from brand to brand.

Here's what I came up with:


3.5 kg 8.08kWh
4kg 6.8kWh
5kg 7.8kWh
6kg 7.9kWh
6.5kg 7.1kWh
8kg 8.15kWh
9kg 9.24kWh
10kg 8.52kWh

My conclusions? When my dryer needs replacing I'm going to look into purchasing a 4kg dryer rather than a 5kg dryer. Of course, the figures may have all changed by the time I'm in the market for a dryer but it's interesting to consider that not all SIZES come out evenly when it comes to overall electricity consumption. And when it comes to tumble dryers, bigger isn't necessarily better.

Not having a tumble dryer at all is possibly a better option again but I prefer for now to concentrate on making changes that don't create too large an inconvenience for our family. There are times when it just seems to be "necessary" or at the very least "very helpful" to own a tumble dryer.


WASHING MACHINE

When we made the decision to move to this farm, we also made the decision to go out and purchase a front loader washing machine. Thankfully these days they actually work out cheaper than top loading machines. When we originally bought our top loading machine they were still MUCH more expensive. We didn't have the luxury in those days of purchasing for "later savings" (ie. we were broke) and really weren't as aware of environmental factors as a factor in purchasing decisions at that point in our lives.

Like I said in my Blog Action Day post, "when we know better, we do better".

Now the BIG advantage of front loading washing machines is their lower use of water. Here in Australia that is an even MORE important consideration than electricity consumption. If you need more convincing, you might like to read an article written by Snoskred called Humans Let Us All Waste Water .

They also use less detergent, don't wear out clothes as quickly and strangely enough tend to use less electricity. I say "strangely enough" because their wash times are longer. I did a bit of investigating and I *think* the energy savings come in when you wash in warm water. I guess because you use less warm water so less costs involved in heating a larger quantity of water.

Regardless, I am really pleased that we have a front loading washing machine. Ours costs us around 11c per load (0.63kWh) in electricity. Only a small savings if we can reduce the number of loads we wash but small savings can add up to become bigger savings.

IRON

Using the iron costs around 11.9c per hour to run (based on 15c per kWh so more for me as we pay a little over 18c per kWh here). A simple way to solve this energy usage would be to not iron. LOL. I still can't get my head around the fact that some people *really* don't iron.

Apparently it's most energy efficient to do the ironing all in one hit as the iron then only has to heat up once. In all honesty, my iron seems to take about 1 minute to heat up and I often start ironing with something that doesn't require quite as much heat so I think the difference would be negligable and I do prefer to iron in smaller stints of 15 minutes (sound familiar? LOL). I guess that is still preferable to ironing each garment individually.

Running the iron on steam setting is supposed to use more electricity but then you have to weigh that up against possible taking longer to iron garments. I have to admit I do like my steam.



So, have we learnt anything from all of this? I just did a quick calculation and at 7 loads of washing per week and about 3/4 hour of ironing, my laundry is responsible for about 5kWh's of electricity per week. Not as big a draw on our power as I was expecting it to be really.

If you were to add just 1 load of tumble dryer in per week you'd double that usage to around 10kWh's per week. If I dried all 7 loads of washing in the tumble dryer (that would be almost 50kg of clothing so 10 dryer loads) we're talking around 50kWh's per week (with only 5kWh's of those being NON DRYER appliances).

It's certainly very easy to spot the culprit in the laundry when it comes to electricity consumption!!!!