As smart meters tally up the pounds this winter, most households are looking for ways to save energy and therefore cash. While we have already seen some clever hacks from various money savers, we are always on the lookout for more, and financial guru Martin Lewis has come up with the latest. He has highlighted a way to dry clothes indoors - without using the heating- at a cost of just 7p an hour.
Good laundry drying days get fewer as we head into the winter months, and many people are shunning tumble dryers as a way to get their clothes dry. Martin Lewis's highlighted method of drying doesn't involve putting your entire central heating system on but may mean that you have to buy an extra appliance if you don't already own one.
The consumer champion was speaking on The Martin Lewis podcast, according to Yorkshire Live, and explained that by using a dehumidifier instead of central heating, you could dry clothes at home for just 7p per hour.
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Mr Lewis said: "Many dehumidifiers have different wattages, the one I checked out was 200 Watts. Once we it's 200 watts and we know a Kilowatt is 1,000 watts which is how electricity tends to be priced, we know this is a fifth of a kilowatt.
"And you pay roughly 34p per kw per hour. A fifth is 7p so you're going to pay roughly 7p per hour to run a dehumidifier at 200 watts assuming it uses full power the whole time. Which is generally far far cheaper than putting the heating on.
"If a dehumidifier does work for you it will definitely have lower electricity bills but of course you do have the initial capital outlay of buying a dehumidifier and see how that works for you."
Martin went on to add that the same equation could also be used to work out if it's cheaper for you to cook food in an air fryer, a microwave or an oven.
However, he said: "The problem with the equation for heating equipment is an oven is going to be about 2000W. A microwave, I believe from memory, a best guess explanation, a microwave gives you consistent heat whereas an oven is warming up to full temperature and then topping it up so it isn't running at full power the whole time.
"But if you're doing a jacket potato for 10 minutes it's going to be far cheaper than doing a single jacket potato in an oven and keeping it on for an hour and a half. However if you were doing a full roast dinner and you were cooking many of them, that is where it's probably cheaper than putting 5 or 6 jacket potatoes in a microwave because each additional object you put in a microwave, you need to keep it on longer because a microwave just heats the individual object. General equation is, find the wattage of an item, then work out how many kilowatts or what fraction of a kilowatt it's using, then multiply that by 34p per hour of use."
"If you had a 1000W microwave and you put it on for 10 minutes, one KWH for a sixth of an hour, a sixth of 34p is about 6p, shall we say? So it's 6p turning the microwave on for that amount of time. So yes it's a very useful equation."
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