Clothes Dryer Vent/Heat Reclaimer: Review of "Heat Keeper" CHK100

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Categories : Green living ,Environment
Tags : Environment green living topics home ,Review

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Reclaiming Clothes Dryer Heat with the The Heat Keeper CHK100 (3 out of 5)

When you realize just how inexpensive and easy to install this clothes dryer vent/heat reclaimer is, you will wonder why every household does not have one, and why you have never heard of one before. The Heat Keeper CHK100 is the simplest of the clothes dryer money saving devices noted in this article series. The Heat Keeper CHK100 provides an easy way to get the heat which your dryer is exhausting into the great outdoors to stay indoors.

Ordinarily, the hot air that is exhausted from a dryer’s vent causes a negative pressure in the building from which it is blowing and as a result air is drawn back from the outdoors into the vicinity of the dryer through cracks and gaps in the building to compensate. However, this air is cold. It is just as if you opened a window quite wide. A lot of heat is sent out, and lots more cold air comes back to take its place.

So, even though you are running a heat-producing appliance, you are actually cooling your house down when you opperate a vented dryer. To put it another way, when you run a dryer that vents to the outside, you are discarding your dryer’s energy, and you are discarding your furnace’s energy as well. The Heat Keeper CHK100 stops this from happening.

When you use this clothes dryer vent/ heat reclaimer not only do you preserve the ambient heat from your furnace or space heating system, but you also recycle the heat that was produced by your dryer itself. You change what was originally a heat losing operation into a heat gaining opperation. When you consider that a dryer heat element produces approximately 5000 watts of heat (the same as two base board heaters) then you start to realize what a saving this is.

Why You May Not Like the CYK100 Heat Keeper

In older leaky houses, there is a substantial air flow from outdoor to indoor through cracks and openings. In colder climates, all this fresh air influx creates very dry air when it is heated up by the furnace or heating system. Under these circumstances, it is possible that the added moisture that your dryer would add back into the house if you were using the CYK100 Heat Keeper would be of benefit. However, if your house was build in more recent times, say in the last ten or twenty years, it is likely that the added moisture from the washing load would be problematic. Modern well sealed houses do not suffer from winter time dryness the way that older leaky houses do, and the moisture would lead to high humidity and condensation on cold surfaces.

Most individuals would not enjoy the smell of dryer exhaust in their house. However, that would be a personal consideration and with a very leaky house, it may not even be an issue.

If you have taken these points into account, and you decide to try out the CYK100 Heat Keeper, you would not lose a lot of money in the purchase of this implement. It costs less than ten dollars and the time that it would take you to install this - the simplest - of clothes dryer money saving devices.

This post is part of the series: Green Laundry - Heat from Clothes Dryers - How to prevent the loss

The big energy consumer in Laundry is the heat that is used, first for washing and then for drying. There are different ways that we can address this heat use, and loss. The following series of articles looks at different solutions to the problem of Clothes Drying Heat Waste.