Whichever way you dry you clothes, it makes sense to use a washer with a good spin function. When drying clothes inside on a rack, the evaporation from the wet fabrics will cool the home to cool down a fraction but this is a marginal effect – and although it's a disadvantage in the winter, it's a bonus on a hot summer's day, when you'll get some free air conditioning. A household running a dryer 200 times a year could save nearly half a tonne of CO2e by switching to a clothes rack or washing line. Ultimately, though, all tumble drying is wasteful. (Where the machine is positioned is also relevant, as the captured heat will be more of a benefit in, say, the kitchen, than it will in a garage.) So the relative impact of each depends on whether you use the dryer all year around or just in the winter when the clothes-lines doesn't work as well. Unvented condensing dryers use a little bit more energy per cycle, but in the winter all that heat stays inside your house, where theoretically it should reduce the burden on the heating system. However your dryer is powered, if you use a conventional vented model, most of the heat is simply pumped out to the outside world, which is sensible in the summer but wasteful in the colder months when you will simultaneously be heating the home by other means. Gas tumble-dryers do exist but aren't yet popular, despite consuming far less energy. This is typically more than twice as carbon-intensive as creating heat from gas – for the simple reason that, in the case of electricity, most of the energy in the fuel gets wasted up the cooling tower of a power plant, with yet more getting lost in transmission to the home. Part of the problem is that tumble dryers (like dishwashers and washing machines) generally use electricity to generate their heat. As the numbers above show, for a typical 40☌ wash nearly three-quarters of the carbon footprint comes from the drying rather than the washing – which reflects the general rule of thumb that the more heat an appliance generates, the more energy it takes to run. But the much bigger savings relate to drying. Modern washing powders work just as well at 30☌, so there is a very simple saving to be had here of 100g per wash just by turning the temperature down.
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