In our household like we're doing 3 to 4 loads a week, so our potential savings are reduced relative to Steve's numbers. However, we will also be adding a heat pump water heater and an inductive cook top to round out our home electrification which means those pesky monthly natual gas bills will go away, bringing additional savings. Happy to hear about the 110 HPD options now available. Cheers and thanks for the great session.
Heat pump dryers only seem to be £100 more than a condenser dryer or vented. Bearing in mind that you're saving 50p each load it will only take 200 loads to pay for it self. I do 4 loads a week, so will take less than a year and a half to get the difference back. Also Hotpoint have a 10 year warnaty so years of savings.
I'm not sure where people get the idea that a heat pump dryer would make the room colder. For one, it's not venting, so it's not pumping air out of the house as would be the case with a conventional vented dryer. Secondly, a heat pump is an air conditioner conceptually running in reverse, so rather than generating cool aiir it generates heat. Even were that 100% efficient, which is impossible due to physics, it would generate exactly as much heat as it does cool air. Since it's not 100% efficient, it's a net generator of heat. It may help to compare it to something that more people have experience with: room dehumidifiers. While a dehumidifier creates a cool surface to condense water out of the air, it then runs that cooled air through the hot section of the system to increase efficiency. The air coming out of the dehumidifier will be warmer than the air going in, and thats essentially how a heat pump dryer operates as well. I don't (yet) have a heat pump dryer to look at, however I suspect some of that cool air is diverted away from the heating section to allow for higher temperatures around 150°F max - some go higher, but they really should not exceed that for optimal clothing care. That is considerably waarmer than the air coming out of our dehumidifiers. Still, while that may direct colder air to the room, because it remains a closed system since it's not vented, the heat has to end up back in the room eventually.
Can you ask your guest next time about his owners comments on all in one units? Steve Sheinkopf, owner and CEO of Yale Appliance in Boston and one of the industry’s most prolific bloggers put it bluntly: “I hate these things,” he told us. “It’s really a product that should not be on the market. We do everything in our power not to sell them.” The problem, Sheinkopf said, is that the repair rate is sky high-over 70 percent within the first year, according to his service department’s records. “They seem to be the most repair-prone products we sell.”
He also said that he likes the GE wash dryer and LG wash dry tower more recently. But did bring up expensive repair bills being a possibility. He also noted that the repairs for the heat pumps are more related to a lack of maintenance, requiring a cleaning of coils, and when that aspect was removed the repair rates are as reliable as other dryers. The GE wash dryer version does look easy to repair though as the heat pump section can be replaced as a whole and that would be a quicker repair for others. (As detailed by another technician channel I watched.)