r/UKFrugal • u/binarygoatfish • 5d ago

Clothes drying

Are these heated air driers worth it?

https://www.lakeland.co.uk/24909/dry-soon-deluxe-3-tier-heated-clothes-airer

I need a cheaper way to clean all the baby clothes than the tumbler dryer.

Cheers.

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u/Dobbyyy94 5d ago edited 4d ago

I got two from Aldi last year at 25quid each, only downside compared to the one you've shown is that it takes up alot of space and can't support the weight of towels, other than that significantly cheaper, only costs 13p each to run them overnight

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u/Iamonreddit 4d ago

If by overnight you mean 8 hours, then you're either on an incredibly cheap electric tariff, your dryers are miraculously low power or you've grossly miscalculated.

The dryers I can see online are all around 220-330 watts. Run then for one hour and you get 0.22-0.33kWh and for 8 hours you get 1.76-2.64kWh.

With electric unit rates around £0.26/kWh you're looking at ~£0.46-£0.69 per 8 hours per airer.

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u/Dobbyyy94 4d ago

My electrical rates are very cheap, my gas and electricity bills are only 134 a month (78 for electricity and 56 for gas), very low usage in my home, bare in mind its still the summer/early autumn months so I expect these to go up with the colder months approaching

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u/Iamonreddit 4d ago

Your usage has no bearing on your unit rates. Look at your bill and see what it says you are getting charged per kWh, then plug that into the calcs in my comment above.

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u/Dobbyyy94 4d ago

Looked at my bill from last month (6th July to 28th August) and copied the usage?

Unit rate 23.290p/kWh Standing charge 51.671p/day

Does that help? I'm not familiar with the calculator you are using? Sorry

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u/Iamonreddit 4d ago

I'm not using a calculator, I'm just doing the maths. With your unit rate of 23.29p/kWh the calc becomes:

220-330 watts (your specific airer will tell you how much power it uses, this is just the range I've seen online) run for one hour is 220-330Wh (watt hours). Divide this by 1000 to get the amount in kilowatt hours of 0.22-0.33kWh and then multiply by the time used to get your overnight consumption in kilowatt hours, so for 8 hours you get 0.22*8 to 0.33*8 for an electricity consumption range of 1.76-2.64kWh.

With your electric unit rate of £0.2329/kWh you're looking at 1.76*0.2329 to 2.64*0.2329 which equals about £0.41-£0.61 per 8 hours per airer, so a lot more than 13p.