Gas Vs Electric Dryer Cost Calculator

A tumble dryer's running cost is dominated by the heat needed to evaporate water from the load, roughly the same amount of energy whichever fuel supplies it; what differs is the price of that energy. A conventional electric resistance dryer on a 240 volt circuit draws about 5000 watts, so a 50 minute cycle consumes near 4.2 kilowatt hours, costing about 63 cents at 15 cents per kilowatt hour. A gas dryer burns 20,000 to 25,000 Btu per hour and additionally draws 200 to 400 watts for the drum motor, blower and controls, so the same cycle uses about 0.18 therms plus 0.25 kWh, typically 25 to 35 cents where gas costs 1.20 dollars per therm. The comparison is thus one of tariffs, not of efficiency. Because gas models usually cost 50 to 150 dollars more to buy and may need a gas line and a dedicated shutoff, the honest question is a payback: the price premium divided by the annual operating saving. At five loads a week the saving is often 60 to 90 dollars a year, giving a payback of one to three years, but in regions with cheap electricity and expensive gas the sign reverses. Caveats: vented dryers of both types are far less efficient than a heat pump dryer, which recirculates air and can cut electricity use by half or more; actual cycle time varies with load size, washer spin speed and vent restriction; and installation cost, which dominates when converting a house from one fuel to the other, sits outside the per-load arithmetic.

Mechanical clothes drying began with the hand-cranked ventilator, a perforated drum turned over a fire, patented in France and England in the early nineteenth century and in the United States by George T. Sampson in 1892, whose design used the heat of a stove rather than an open flame. These were ventilators rather than dryers in the modern sense, with no thermostat and no forced air. The automatic electric tumble dryer is generally credited to J. Ross Moore, a North Dakota inventor who developed a drum dryer through the 1930s and licensed it to the Hamilton Manufacturing Company, which brought it to market at the end of that decade. Gas and electric versions diverged immediately for infrastructure reasons: gas dryers followed the ranges and water heaters already plumbed into American kitchens and basements, while electric models needed the 240 volt service that postwar wiring standards made routine. Both spread rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s alongside the automatic washer. Regulation arrived late. Clothes dryers were long excluded from US efficiency labelling on the reasoning that all vented models performed similarly, and it was only in 2014 that the Environmental Protection Agency issued the first ENERGY STAR specification for dryers, using a combined energy factor that finally put gas, electric and the newer heat pump machines on a common measured basis. That change, more than any marketing claim, made rigorous cost comparison between fuels possible.