Stove as a dryer?

[flhpi]

I have always dried my clothes on the line or by the stove. I do run my electric dryer on occasion. I got my electric bill down to less than $20 last month. My friends kids dont know what to think when they come and visit my house. They dont understand why I have clothes on the line with a dryer in the house.

 

[Battenkiller]

Lady BK just loves to break into the camping gear and bring out all kinds of rope, which she then proceeds to run it all over my workshop and hang clothes on. It's a PITA to work around, looks like total crap and I have to wait until it's dry before I can run any dust making machinery. I finally put my foot down and told her she had to limit it to one small line, and only the heavy stuff like jeans and jackets, or stuff that got wet working out in the snow. Gotta admit, though, it sure feels great slipping into a nice hot pair of dry jeans after an hour or two of clearing snow.

As far as adding humidity with laundry... I dunno. I bring in massive amounts of unseasoned wood into my basement all season long, and it gives off huge quantities of water as it dries in my makeshift wood kiln. Probably a couple tons of water all told... about 500 gallons, maybe more. I'm a musical instrument repairman, so I constantly monitor the humidity in the air of my shop. I use a good quality sling psychometer to measure the humidity and rarely to I ever see it climb out of the 25-30% RH range. Which is good, otherwise my wood would never dry in there. But it's real bad for the instruments, so I need to use special dedicated stringed instrument humidifiers called "Dampits" in each instrument. A small price to pay for getting to live in the North country.

I've always found it an almost losing battle to significantly raise RH inside the home without using a large volume or whole house humidifier. Cold outside air is constantly exchanging through the house. That frigid air has very little water in it, and when you heat it up the RH of that air plummets. The typical 1800 sq.ft. home at 72ºF will need about 10 gallons of water added to the air every day just to maintain 35% RH when the outside air is at 30º and 50% RH.

That's a lot of laundry.

The problem only gets worse as outside air temps fall. And you folks who like it hotter have a real uphill battle, and the drier it gets, the warmer you'll want it, especially if you have fans running in the room. Dry air feels colder than moist air at the same temps.

 

[greythorn3]

you can save allot of money on drying clothes if you talk your wife into buying skimpy clothes.. takes allot less btu's to dry tank tops and g string underwear.