Something to Think About

“Education is not something you can finish.”

- Isaac Asimov

While many owners have large condominium units, say something around or above 1,000 square feet, many owners have much smaller ones, as little as 200-400 square feet. In such places, space is at a premium, and that leads the issue of ventless dryers.

A ventless dryer is a type of electric dryer that does not require a vent to the outdoors. This becomes important because every once in awhile, including a week or two ago, I get an email from a board of directors that wants to know if it should allow an owner to vent their dryer through the common area wall. This can create problems because it's another opening that has to be sealed, or water can get in and do what it does, i.e. damage the property and raise condominium fees.

One way to handle the situation is to encourage the use of ventless dryers. How do they work? Typical vented dryers pump hot air into the dryer to heat the clothes, tumble them to expose the moisture to the heat, and the clothes dry. These dryers use a vent to release the warm air outside, hence the hole in your Unit to the outside.

Contrarily ventless dryers rely on a heat exchanger or a heat pump instead. A condenser dryer takes in cooler air from the laundry room, and warms it up (to help dry the clothes), but then instead of venting the heated air through a hose, it utilizes a heat exchanger to cool it down. As the temperature drops, the condenser then converts the moisture in the heated air back into a liquid and collects it in a chamber. The system then reheats it to continue the cycle until the drying process ends. At the end of the cycle the water is collected in a tray to be disposed of by the Owner.

A heat pump dryer is slightly different. The dryer uses a heat pump to generate warm air, which then circulates through the drum to dry the clothes. The warm air passes through an evaporator, where the moisture in the warm air (think humidity) condenses into water. The water is either pulled out or drained, and the remaining dry air is reheated and used again in the drying process.

In each case, the ventless dryer continuously cycles heated air through the dryer drum and then cools the hot air using a heat exchanger to cool the air. This cooling in turn converts the moisture from wet clothes into water, which is either collected in a chamber or drained.

This may all seem new to us, but ventless dryers have been around a long time and are very common in most European homes, and anywhere else the size and age of the architecture is unable to accommodate a traditional vented dryer.

Some of the benefits of having ventless dryers are that they are easy to install, are more energy efficient, and they improve clothing longevity. (You may like that warm fuzzy feeling when clothes come out of the dry, but that warmth has helped degrade and fray the fabrics, and large drums mean clothes tumble more also decreasing their useful lifespan.) And, of course, no hole through the wall that an Association has to worry about.

Some of the detriments to having ventless dryers are that they increase the humidity in a home, have a higher up front cost, have a reduced load capacity, and have longer drying times.

The only thing you are going to want to inquire about at your Association is a drain versus a bucket. If the Unit already has drains in the bathroom or for a washer/dryer, then having a drain for a ventless dryer is a no brainer. If not, you can still approve a ventless dryer, but really need to caution the owners that it must be drained after every use.

Finally, all too often boards of directors are bearers of bad news, telling owners what they can't do. It may be nice to be a bit proactive and let owners know what they can do, and that may well include using ventless dryers.