What's the effect on the clothes themselves? I won't let anything but underwear, gym clothes, socks, and tees in a dryer because it's generally considered bad for them. I hang dry all of my wovens.
Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
61–70 of 192 posts
Re: Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
#62A bit puzzled why GE needs government funding to do research -- they make a lot of money already. The idea sounds pretty neat but I wonder about longevity of the piezeoelectric transducers. A clothes dryer needs to last at least 7-10 years, minimum. A resistive heating element is about as simple as you can get, and it's cheap to replace if it does burn out.
> The idea sounds pretty neat but I wonder about longevity of the piezeoelectric transducers.
If they'll wear out fast it's entirely feasible to design the dryer around user-replaceable piezos.
It may end up like with inkjet printers -- where the dryer itself is just a boring spinning drum with a fan and a moisture collector and a powerful piezo driver, and you end up buying consumable cassettes with the actual transducers inside.
Re: Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
One day we'll invent a technology device to answer the age old question: "Still wet or just cold?"
https://www.amazon.com/SSEYL-MS-C-Textile-Moisture-Meter/dp/...
Perfect, of course this exists. It even has a FUN button for when waiting for the clothes to dry gets too boring.
Re: Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
#64Re: Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention warm clothes is like 80% of the benefit of the dryer ;)
I didn't realize this, but yes, this is absolutely true. I wonder how many people would actually be willing to pay a premium on having their clothes warm when coming out of a dryer.
Most of the energy consumption in a dryer is from the actual drying cycle -- once the clothes are totally dry, the high-temperature cycle to get them all hot doesn't consume much power.
Re: Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
#66Will it kill bug infestations?
Re: Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a dryer is not a consumable, shouldn't it last forever? If a battery is a consumable, shouldn't it last only one charging cycle?
No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durable_good
so according to these links, a battery that lasts 2 years is a consumable good but a fridge that last 3 years is a durable good..... I think I get it.
Re: Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the main reason. The difference in the longevity of my clothes -- same exact articles, same brand, same material, thickness, size and stitching -- from switching from a "hotbox" dryer to condensation dryer was initially amazing. No more did cuffs and collars start to crack and fail, nor did my shirts slowly develop small tears. The latest (2014 is when they really started to hit the market) heat pump dryers d…
You said the difference was "/initially/ amazing"; did something change later?
No. After 10 years of using them I've just been acclimated to not having my shirt collars and cuffs destroyed in the dryer.
Re: Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 'soundproof box' is hard because most of those boxed things we want to quiet down (say, pets) still need to be a part of our environment, breathing air and the like. A clothes dryer, meanwhile, is a near-ideal case for vacuum isolation + elastic dampening. Build a box with a door; hang an airtight motorized barrel in the box from a bungee cord, with a second door, and electrical connection; and then, whenever both…
If you are going to go through all the effort to create a proper vacuum, and then isolate all the little penetrations needed to maintain whatever is inside, just throw the wet clothes into the vacuum and call the thing a freeze dryer. No sonic required. A heat lamp inside a vacuum chamber would probably dry stuff using much less energy than either sonic of hot air.
I'm not sure whether organic materials would be very happy with all their water content getting sublimated out of them due to the sudden drop in pressure. The result would probably look more like cotton jerky than fluffy towels. (If anyone has a Youtube link of such a reaction, though, I'd love to be proven wrong!)
Re: Ultra-low-energy consumption ultrasonic clothes dryer
#70And how will my cat react to this thing? Something with enough sonic energy to vaporize a significant volume of water is probably loud enough to wake every animal in the area.
Looks like they calculated the optimum as ~500-600 Hz? That's in human hearing range too.
That's definitionally not ultrasonic, so I don't think that's the relevant frequency.