Dehumidifier versus heat pump tumble dryer

[redby]

Can anybody give me some real world advice on this please.

Recently bought a big dehumidifier for drying clothes. It runs a whole day or more to dry all the clothes hung near it on racks and hangers.

I know that it would be more efficient to dry in a small space, preferably in a cupboard or with a tent arrangement.
We don't have a suitable small area to set aside so it's just running in a part of the living area.

I'm beginning to think it would be easier to just get a new fancy Heat pump tumble dryer. We waste so much time hanging up clothes on hangers or on the racks which then sit there for hours.

Our dehumidifier uses 320 watts. I assume that means hourly?
So having it on for 8 hours is 2.56kwh! ? That does allow me to dry 2 loads I guess if it's all clustered around the dehumidifier, but to be honest it seems to take more than eight hours and I am finding I'm switching it on the next day as well as the relative humidity is still quite high and the clothes still feel a teeny bit cold/damp

Looking at the A+++ dryers the say they use 1.4KWH to dry a full 9kg load.

So assuming I can afford the outlay, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper in the long run to use a dryer for each load? I'm just imagining how much easier it would be just to throw everything in and having it all dry 4 hours later.

Am I missing something?

A good heat pump dryer typically cost about 73p a load if electric is 34p a KW. The 1.4 kw per load would only be 48 pence. It's currently costing you £1.18 to dry 2 loads . i.e. 59 pence per load. So you'd save 11 pence of electricity per load.

You really do need to factor in the purchase price to make a fair comparison. Samsung gives a 5 year warranty on their dryers which cost £650. So, £130 a year which means you'd need to do more than 1300 loads a year before you started to recoup the purchase cost.

www.beko.co.uk/lifestyle/benefits-of-a-tumble-dryer-heat-pump

Are you sure that 1.4kWh per 9kg is correct ?

The website above seems to indicate 0.24 kWh per kg, which is 2.16 kWh per 9 kg. That's for A++. I doubt whether A+++ can get that much better ...

For me it would be more a matter of convenience than cost.

You don't really say what the mass of your 2 loads is with the dehumidifier. If each load is 9 kg or 2 loads is 9 kg total.

I doubt whether you will get much more efficient than the dehumdifier in terms of cost if you can set it up properly with some sort of mini tent. Is it not possible to get a big polythene bag you can put over the clothes horse ?

To me it's a bit like the dishwasher issue. The dishwasher is probably more expensive than washing up, but the money you save isn't probably worth the extra hassle.

@GasPanic
I was going by data sheets like this

I'm using a dehumidifier, but most loads have been line dried to damp. I WFH in the (ex) dining room, and my airer and dehumidifier are in there. I also have a little thermometer which tells me the relative humidity. If I put washing on the airer, the humidity climbs up about 70%. It takes the dehumidifier a couple of hours to get the humidity down below 60%. I set the dehumidifer to come on again for a couple of hours overnight. It's all dry in the morning.

I do have a tumble dryer, and I might end up using it, but I'm hoping that once I put the heating on, everything will dry faster. My tumble dryer promises to dry a load in an hour and a half, but it lies.