Quote:
Originally Posted by NiHaoMike
Just hang the clothes in a closet and run a dehumidifier in the closet.
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As in a dehumidifier that uses a cold plate to condense humidity and then heats up the exiting air? I don't see how that would accomplish anything other than create a musty closet that dries clothes much more slowly for a greater expenditure of energy. After the hanging clothes have pulled a lot of heat out of the air through evaporation, then we would put energy into chilling the air to condense the humidity, and then warm it up again. That's more overall energy than to heat it once and then recover much of it with a heat pump... The dehumidifier would use at least twice the energy. It's just that a lot of it would be hidden as added load on the HVAC.
The cold plate approach works in new ventless dryers because it is part a closed loop. In an open loop like a closet, (even a closed closet) efficiency would suffer.
During heating season, my house is ventilated only by the dryer and bathroom/kitchen exhaust fans on manual control, but CO2 rarely rises above 800 ppm.