Martin Lewis has sounded the alarm for those opting for a tumble dryer rather than a dehumidifier, during a segment on his BBC Sounds podcast and ITV staple show. The finance guru, who’s become a trusted voice in household money matters, took to the airwaves of The Martin Lewis Podcast to share a vital snippet on the energy consumption topic: “Many dehumidifiers have different wattages – the one I checked out was 200W. Once we know it’s 200W and we know a kilowatt is 1,000W, which is how electricity tends to be priced, we know this is a fifth of a kilowatt.”
He calculated: “And you pay roughly 34p per kilowatt per hour. A fifth is 7p, so you’re going to pay roughly 7p per hour to run a dehumidifier at 200W, assuming it uses full power the whole time.”
Tumble dryers function by spinning wet clothes in a heated drum, but they can hit the wallet hard. Data from uSwitch suggests that the typical tumble dryer racks up 3kWh per cycle, with each run costing about 83p given the current price cap. For avid users clocking in 150 minutes weekly, this translates to an annual cost of £89.44.
According to uSwitch, the average dehumidifier uses about 185W to run and has a cost per load/ cost per hour of around 10p. The price comparison site says households use a dehumidifier on average for around 180 minutes per week, reports Birmingham Live.
This means the weekly cost to use one will sit at around 29p per week or around £15.03 per year. With the heated airer, uSwitch says the average household runs their dryer for around 116 minutes a week.
This comes at a cost of 16p a week – or around 8p per cycle/ hour according to its Power House data. Over the year, a heated air dryer racks up a cost of £8.31.
