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Post by Merge on Aug 4, 2023 21:15:34 GMT
We've experienced this issue in multiple vacation rentals in Europe and now in Australia, so I'm figuring this must be a cultural difference I'm not understanding.
We always book rentals that list an in-unit washer and dryer so that we can pack light and wash our clothes. While the washers work fine, the dryers almost never dry our clothes completely in one cycle, no matter how careful we are not to overload. We either have to run several cycles, or else take the clothes out and drape them over the furniture to dry.
The dryer in the unit we're in now has a setting called "cupboard dry," and the timing on it is over 3 hours! I assume "cupboard dry" is completely dry, as in dry enough to put away.
Is this typical? Do people in other countries generally hang their clothes after giving them a cycle in the dryer? Or do they skip the dryer entirely? I don't love draping our clothes around the place to dry because it leaves us no place to sit. What do you do?
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Post by leannec on Aug 4, 2023 21:22:14 GMT
I don't know if you were looking for a Canadian perspective ... but I'll give it!  Our dryers are exactly like American dryers ... we dry until the items are dry and then we fold and put away ... I rarely see laundry hung on a line here in the city (Calgary) ... probably because it is always winter!  |
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Post by Merge on Aug 4, 2023 21:31:05 GMT
I don't know if you were looking for a Canadian perspective ... but I'll give it! Our dryers are exactly like American dryers ... we dry until the items are dry and then we fold and put away ... I rarely see laundry hung on a line here in the city (Calgary) ... probably because it is always winter! Sorry, I probably should have specified European/Aussie peas. |
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Post by lainey on Aug 4, 2023 21:37:21 GMT
Our dryer dries completely, I use it for towels and bedding and don't need to do any draping. It takes around two hours to dry a full load of towels and an hour to dry a duvet cover, sheet and pillow cases.
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Post by Merge on Aug 4, 2023 21:47:42 GMT
Our dryer dries completely, I use it for towels and bedding and don't need to do any draping. It takes around two hours to dry a full load of towels and an hour to dry a duvet cover, sheet and pillow cases. See, two hours is more than I expect. We can easily dry a load of towels in an hour at home. I expect your dryers use less energy, but I wonder how much you really conserve when you have to run the thing for 2-3 hours to dry your things! |
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Post by gar on Aug 4, 2023 22:15:51 GMT
I am with Lainey. Seems as though ours are perhaps gentler…I don’t know? They have historically been considered expensive to use so I’ve never been in the habit of drying any laundry completely and solely in the dryer. I tend to use it to finish off things when they’re 80%/90% dry. I don’t know if that common
Mine has cupboard dry as an option as well as ‘iron dry’ and the usual cottons, delicate, mixed etc.
I just looked it up and at current energy prices it costs an average of 69p/88c an hour to run.
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Post by gillyp on Aug 4, 2023 22:17:04 GMT
My normal drying time for assorted clothes is 2 hours 45 minutes. I’d rather it was shorter but I wouldn’t want a machine where the heat was hotter and maybe damage items. I take things out as they become dry and just the heavier stuff gets left for the full cycle.
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Post by Merge on Aug 4, 2023 22:21:34 GMT
My normal drying time for assorted clothes is 2 hours 45 minutes. I’d rather it was shorter but I wouldn’t want a machine where the heat was hotter and maybe damage items. I take things out as they become dry and just the heavier stuff gets left for the full cycle. US machines typically have high/medium/low heat settings so you can adjust and not damage anything. Towels, for example, aren't going to be damaged by high heat and will dry much faster that way. Anyway, clearly just a societal difference that I need to get used to.  I mostly wanted to make sure that I wasn't using the machine incorrectly. In Prague, for example, we couldn't read any of the markings on the machine so just chose random settings, and never could get the clothes to dry. |
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pilcas
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 2,913 
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Post by pilcas on Aug 4, 2023 22:32:36 GMT
I have run into those washer/dryer machines several times in Europe. It takes more patience than I have!
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Post by KiwiJo on Aug 4, 2023 22:53:30 GMT
New Zealand here - my dryer takes about an hour to dry towels on the setting that I use. However there are many settings - I’ve never seen one with just low, medium, high. Mine, for example, has settings for ready-to-iron, ready-to-wear, jeans, extra-dry, delicates, freshen up, anti-crease……. I marked the 2 settings we use most often with a marker pen.  |
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Post by Merge on Aug 4, 2023 23:23:48 GMT
New Zealand here - my dryer takes about an hour to dry towels on the setting that I use. However there are many settings - I’ve never seen one with just low, medium, high. Mine, for example, has settings for ready-to-iron, ready-to-wear, jeans, extra-dry, delicates, freshen up, anti-crease……. I marked the 2 settings we use most often with a marker pen. Yeah, our dryers tend to just have the temperature setting and then you can either use auto-dry, where it senses the amount of moisture left, and set it to more/less dry, or just set a timer cycle. I guess some people have fancy driers with steam settings and such, but we don't have that. The dryer where we are staying right now has a bewildering number of settings! We tend to use medium heat for clothes and high heat for sheets and towels. Low heat only for delicates. Anyway, my clothes had been in the dryer for two hours already this morning and were still not dry, so I took them out and draped them over the chairs. |
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Post by anniefb on Aug 4, 2023 23:26:58 GMT
NZ Pea here as well. Mine's an old dryer - 29 years old now so doesn't have as many settings as newer models but I think it takes about 1 1/2 hours for a load of towels using 'cupboard dry'. I do use the dryer in winter particularly when it's raining a lot but otherwise my preference is to hang the washing outside on the line, even in winter.
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Post by AussieMeg on Aug 4, 2023 23:29:50 GMT
I found out how ineffective our clothes dryers are here after reading a post from an American ex-pat living in Australia. She made the same comment, that the clothes dryers here take too long. I also learnt on here that a lot of clothes dryers in America have an exhaust vent. I rarely use the clothes dryer, and could easily live without one. In the warmer months I hang my clothes on the clothes line outside. In winter I hang them on a drying rack over a ducted heating vent. It's too expensive to use the dryer. Probably because they are so inefficient and take over an hour to dry! |
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Post by Scrappyhappy on Aug 4, 2023 23:52:31 GMT
We have a washer/dryer combo in our RV. I made sure to have a vent installed so the clothes would dry faster. If the unit isn't vented it takes quite a bit longer to dry. This could be why your clothes aren't drying like you are accustomed to using your own dryer.
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Post by librarylady on Aug 4, 2023 23:52:50 GMT
If your dryer does not have an exhaust vent--where does the hot air go?--back into the living quarters?
How awful. I envision the dryer adding hot air and the air conditioner trying to cool the home.
That must be a mistaken idea.
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Post by uksue on Aug 5, 2023 0:08:08 GMT
A lot of our white goods have eco settings now. My washer has a an eco setting which takes almost 3 hrs for a full load and uses much less water, but I tend to just use the cotton setting on cold which takes about 70 mibs for a 10kg load
I rarely use my 20 yr old tumble dryer due to the expense- If I can't dry outside I mainly use an auret that can be heated, but I use it cold with a dehumidifier inside and the cover over. Takes about 75 minutes to dry a full load and is very cheap to run.
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Post by uksue on Aug 5, 2023 0:09:26 GMT
If your dryer does not have an exhaust vent--where does the hot air go?--back into the living quarters? How awful. I envision the dryer adding hot air and the air conditioner trying to cool the home. That must be a mistaken idea. You can either have it venting into a special container, ir many people have condenser dryers that don't need venting. |
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Post by belgravia on Aug 5, 2023 0:12:06 GMT
When we vacationed at a villa in Italy a few years ago, the dryer took forever (2-3 hours) to dry a load of clothes. I remember it having a reservoir that would fill with water as your clothes dried and I’d have to empty the water a couple times as the load dried. It was weird, and a pain in the ass, but I remember being really happy to have laundry facilities!
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Chinagirl828
Drama Llama
Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 6,467
Jun 28, 2014 6:28:53 GMT
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Post by Chinagirl828 on Aug 5, 2023 0:24:30 GMT
I don't even know how long mine takes to dry a load as I typically only use it to finish off something that I want to use now. I hang my washing outside when possible, or on a clothes horse (airer) inside when it's too wet/not windy enough.
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Post by Merge on Aug 5, 2023 0:37:24 GMT
I want to like the idea of hanging clothes outside to dry, but where I live that would be pointless. With the humidity they’d just mildew (or fade in the sun). And I’m thinking back to the days that I laundered tons of tiny girl clothes - what a pain those would be to hang up and take down. All those little socks! Lol
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Post by **GypsyGirl** on Aug 5, 2023 0:45:35 GMT
Does the dryer have a drawer that collects the condensation ( water)? If so, make sure you are dumping the water when it fills up.
When faced with new foreign washer/dryers the first thing I do is Google the brand, model Number and look for a manual online. Then you can figure out settings, cycle times etc. I’ve only failed with that method once. It was an older Italian washer with only numbers and symbols when we lived in KZ. I spent a year just picking random numbers and hoping I ended up with clean clothes. Good luck!
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Post by Merge on Aug 5, 2023 0:48:03 GMT
Does the dryer have a drawer that collects the condensation ( water)? If so, make sure you are dumping the water when it fills up. When faced with new foreign washer/dryers the first thing I do is Google the brand, model Number and look for a manual online. Then you can figure out settings, cycle times etc. I’ve only failed with that method once. It was an older Italian washer with only numbers and symbols when we lived in KZ. I spent a year just picking random numbers and hoping I ended up with clean clothes. Good luck! No idea. If so, it’s not obvious. I did think of googling a manual but reading that seemed like a lot of work on vacation. 😂 |
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Post by myshelly on Aug 5, 2023 0:49:53 GMT
The thing about having to dump water out of the dryers is so interesting…do American dryers not have that because they’re so hot that the water just evaporates?
If you hang your laundry outside, do you not have to worry about pollen and dust? Anything we leave outside from March to May turns bright yellow-green from being covered in pollen. Your laundry would be dirtier after it dried than before you washed it!
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Post by ntsf on Aug 5, 2023 1:01:38 GMT
american dryers are mostly vented outside, but.. there are some that vent into a bucket thing and you would have to clean lint and water possibly..
I never hang out clothes to dry.. the fog can drip all day. and I don't want pollen. I had a combo washer/dryer in hong kong and a load took 1/2 the day.. the dryer part could only handle 1/2 wash load. I also had interior lines.. in the maid's room (no maid). but I had to hang clothes in the closets --the closets had heaters. then they got dry.
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moodyblue
Drama Llama
Posts: 6,173
Location: Western Illinois
Site Supporter
Jun 26, 2014 21:07:23 GMT
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Post by moodyblue on Aug 5, 2023 1:05:58 GMT
The thing about having to dump water out of the dryers is so interesting…do American dryers not have that because they’re so hot that the water just evaporates? If you hang your laundry outside, do you not have to worry about pollen and dust? Anything we leave outside from March to May turns bright yellow-green from being covered in pollen. Your laundry would be dirtier after it dried than before you washed it! And it’s not just the pollen or dust on the laundry; it’s the effect on people with allergies. I grew up on a farm and we hung everything out to dry when the weather was good. But with allergies, now, that is something I would never do. (And I hated the chore of hanging the laundry out.) |
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breetheflea
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,888
Location: PNW
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Post by breetheflea on Aug 5, 2023 1:13:05 GMT
When our dryer was broken, I had clothes draped all over my yard... they dried stiff and the texture was weird. I think I prefer my clothes dried in the dryer even if it takes three hours.
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Post by Basket1lady on Aug 5, 2023 2:28:10 GMT
That’s very common From my experience in Northern Europe. I honestly think that doing laundry Was the hardest part about living in a foreign country, Or at least Belgium. Depending on the setting that I used, it could take up to three hours to wash load of laundry, and then another two hours to dry it. I got in the habit of doing a load of laundry almost every night because electricity was a lot cheaper after 10 PM and it took so long to do a Load.
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wellway
Prolific Pea
Posts: 8,760
Jun 25, 2014 20:50:09 GMT
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Post by wellway on Aug 5, 2023 6:47:31 GMT
I have a condenser dryer and if your machine is also a condenser, my advice would be to do a couple of things before using, ensure the water collector is empty and check the filters. The one near the door and then the condenser itself, it can become caked in fluff. Apart from the fire hazard aspect, the condenser won't work as efficiently.
I think my cupboard dry setting takes 2 hours 10 minutes. I only use it infrequently, my electric bill thanks me!
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Post by Merge on Aug 5, 2023 7:22:30 GMT
Thanks y'all. I found the water collector and it doesn't appear to have anything in it, which makes me wonder if the dryer is working properly. Who knows. I'm so mad at the owner of this rental for other reasons that I don't want to ask.
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Post by dewryce on Aug 5, 2023 7:27:43 GMT
The thing about having to dump water out of the dryers is so interesting…do American dryers not have that because they’re so hot that the water just evaporates? If you hang your laundry outside, do you not have to worry about pollen and dust? Anything we leave outside from March to May turns bright yellow-green from being covered in pollen. Your laundry would be dirtier after it dried than before you washed it! And it’s not just the pollen or dust on the laundry; it’s the effect on people with allergies. I grew up on a farm and we hung everything out to dry when the weather was good. But with allergies, now, that is something I would never do. (And I hated the chore of hanging the laundry out.) This was my first thought, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. We have to make sure our car vehicle’s air is recycled within as well or I get stopped up, and that’s taking a daily allergy med. |
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I mostly wanted to make sure that I wasn't using the machine incorrectly. In Prague, for example, we couldn't read any of the markings on the machine so just chose random settings, and never could get the clothes to dry.
