AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY OF CLOTHES DRYERS

The domestic clothes dryer is one of the most energy-consumptive appliances in the residential sector, but there has been relatively little work to study its environmental aspects and improve upon its design and efficiency. Our research group is beginning such a project, the ultimate goal of which is to provide decision-making tools for the public (e.g. when buying a dryer) and for policy makers (e.g. when mandating appliance performance criteria). Our first step is to study the behaviour of a clothes dryer to (a) gain experience with the devices and (b) create baseline empirical models of their general behaviour. In this article, we will report our results to date, including what how we modelled and analyzed a specific test dryer, and the results we gathered from experiments. We identify behavioural characteristics of the dryer that may suggest either re-design opportunities or guidelines for dryer use. While studying a single dryer is clearly a limiting factor, we do expect to find general trends to be consistent with other dryers of similar design.