How much power does a gas dryer use.
 

I finally picked up a natural gas dryer.
It's going to be my new outside dryer.
My old electric scrap yard find outside dryer has served me well and will be given to a needy good home.

The natural gas dryer is using a consistent 650 volt amps. Remember generators and power inverters only care about volt amps.
So your electrical power consumption is 650 volt amps times how ever long the dryer is ran for. So after 1 hour it will use about 0.65kwh.
That's nearly 1/10 the electrical power you would expect an electrical dryer to use.

From a cost stand point running this dryer will cost about 5 to 10 cents worth of power. An electrical dryer uses up to $1 each cycle. Gas use, if it runs 25,000btus of gas for an hour that's only about 12 cents worth of natural gas, if gas is sold by the 1,000,000btu and 1Mbtu costs $5.
With propane your gas dryer will use between 0.5 and 1 pounds of propane per hour if my assumptions are correct.

From an over all efficiency stand point burning the natural gas for heating at the point of use is up to 3 times the efficiency of turning the gas into electrical power, transmitting it to the point of use for heat.

Keep in mind it will not use gas the whole time. It heats turns the gas off cools off some then heats back up.

Based in the size of the burner I'm guessing it burns gas at a rate of 30,000 to 35,000 btu per hour.
25,000 was my average guess based on what I could find on gas dryers.

On startup when the burner ignition coil is going it draws about 1kVA. For only for about 30 seconds. Then drops back to 660VA and 280 watts or so.
The power factor is .44 so I'm thinking this could be a good candidate for power factor correction since it's just motors and solenoids.

Remember go by Volt Amps that's all generators and inverters care about.
Volt Amps are the load applied to the power generator, watts are what actually gets the work done.

Very interesting topic. I have a question related to this.
How do you fix a gas dryer that has no heat? Because i am facing this kind of problem with my existing gas dryer. Can anyone suggest?
R/ Big James

Top 5 reasons:

1. Blown thermal fuse or high-limit switch
2. Defective gas valve solenoid
3. Bad igniter
4. Faulty flame sensor
5. Inoperative cycling thermostat

All of these components can be found for less than $20 each, the most common (thermal fuse) for less than $5. Nearly all home appliances come with a "tech sheet" hidden inside the cover somewhere. It is indeed a treasure map for servicemen: secret menus and diagnostic procedures are described within, as well as part numbers for high failure parts. Makes a repair job much easier.

Mine quit working shortly after my last post. Only took an hour or so to isolate the problem.
Mine had a bad gas solenoid. A $3.50 part.
They are actually very simple and almost all use a gas system made the same way.

A gas dryer typically uses between 20,000 and 25,000 BTU (or .2 to .25 therms) per hour, while an electric dryer typically uses between five and seven kilowatts per hour (kWh).

I am moving and when I take my dryer with me I am going to convert it over to LPG, because I do not want to hook up natural gas. Because of the local coop surcharge, not because I think hydraulic fracturingis bad or anything like that.
I will probably hook this dryer up to its own 40lb LPG tank and use it only during the warmer months.
Since dryers are inefficient I will help this one by:
1 putting it out in the garage, so it's not sucking up air conditioned air, just to heat it up, blow it out side then draw in hot outside air into the house.
2 LPG is expensive so I will likely help my dryer by drawing hot air from the top of the inside of garage's roof.

I have scales to know how much LPG each load uses. I would like to to a before and after comparison of the hot air intake. And a winter versus summer comparison.

The electric dryer will be used in the winter and just vented into the house.

Sounds like a heat pump dryer would be a better fit for you.

I think heap pump dryers are a perfect example of a commercialized rube Goldberg machine.
For one there are few to no used heat pump dryers to be had around here. At least I have never seen one.
Then for all that added cost and complexity they still use at least half the power of a normal electric dryer.
A gas dryer hooked up to natural gas is cheaper to operate.

My electric dryer and the parts to fix it came from the scrap yard, my gas dryer was bought from the local used appliance place for $200.
I'm not going to go spend $1,000 on a heat pump dryer that isn't going to save any money.

From late 2005 to 2011 I didn't even own a dryer. My wife insists on having one for her uniforms since she works at a hospital.
I have a clothes line that will be used a lot. It is so hot and dry here that most things dry faster on the clothes line.
If I hang a load of cloths out and in that load of clothes is a bed sheet, If I hang that bed sheet up first, it will be dry before I can hang up the rest of the load. So it takes around 5 minutes to dry a sheet. So I will hang up everything then go back and take the bed sheet off the line and back inside.

Convert your existing dryer to heat pump by adding parts of a window A/C once you no longer have natural gas.

I have considered doing this, I have a portable A/C unit that discharges air through a 5 inch duct. The air is surprisingly hot and there is way more than enough volume for dryer, but that's a whole nother post.
It cools 12,000btu but discharges up to 18,000btu worth of heat. I have no doubt this A/C units discharge going into a dryer would dry some clothes.

Two months ago, I have a problem with the bad igniter. Great advice

I bought the stuff I will need to hook my natural gas dryer to propane.
I'm going to test a straight gas switch first.
My hypothesis is that the natural gas nozzle will be slightly undersized for propane due to natural gas having a much lower coefficient of stiffness than propane.
The propane flame size and btu/hour use should be less than natural gas.

As I understand gas heat is about 1/3rd the price for electrical heat, obviously this depends a lot on your local prices, you will have to convert everything to the same heat units, BTU is pretty common.

But, generally, if you can use gas heat anywhere at all, it is waaaaaay better than electric heat.