Vented, condenser or heat pump, and what actually suits a laundry down here

Every winter I have the same conversation four or five times. The old dryer has died, the person has stood in an appliance shop for forty minutes reading tickets, and they have come away more confused than they went in, because one machine is $399 and one is $1,900 and the salesman said the expensive one pays for itself.

He is half right, and the half he is wrong about is the half that matters. Which one pays for itself depends almost entirely on the room you are going to put it in, and nobody in the shop asked about the room.

So here is the version I give people on the job, standing next to the dead one.

Vented: the cheap one that heats the room

A vented dryer takes air from the laundry, runs it over an element, blows it through the clothes and then dumps it out the back as hot wet air. That is the whole machine. An element, a fan, a drum, a belt, a thermostat.

Which is why they are cheap to buy and cheap to fix. There is not much in there. A belt is not much money, an element is not much more, and a technician can have the back off one in about ninety seconds. If you want the longest possible life for the least possible outlay, a vented dryer that gets serviced occasionally will outlive most things in the house.

The problem is where the hot wet air goes. A dryer load puts a couple of litres of water into the air of whatever room it is in. In a garage with the roller door up, fine. In a proper laundry with a wall duct going outside, fine. In a cupboard in a unit with a louvre door and no window, you are steaming your own hallway, and in six months there is black mould in the corner and it is not the dryer's fault, it is the room's.

Running cost is the other side. Vented dryers use the most power of the three, comfortably, and a household that dries four or five loads a week will notice it on the bill in a way that a household drying one load a fortnight will not.

The other thing about vented units, and I say this on nearly every dryer job: the lint filter is not optional and the duct is not optional. A choked filter or a crushed duct behind the machine makes it run hotter and longer, trips the thermal overload, and eventually cooks the element. Most of the vented dryers I condemn were killed by lint over a period of years. There is more on how that plays out in why a dryer runs but will not dry.

Condenser: the awkward middle child

A condenser dryer runs the same hot air, but instead of blowing it outside it passes it over a cool heat exchanger, the moisture drops out as water, and the water goes into a tank you empty or a hose that runs to the drain. The air stays in the room.

That solves the mould problem, and it is why condensers ended up in every unit and townhouse in the country. You can put one anywhere.

What people are not told is that it does not solve the heat problem. A condenser still uses an element and it still ends up warming the room, just without the humidity. A condenser going in a small hot laundry in February is an uncomfortable machine to be near.

They cost more to buy than vented, use roughly the same power, and they add a heat exchanger and a condenser fan to the list of things that can go wrong. The exchanger clogs with fine lint that the filter did not catch, and when it does the machine gets slower and slower over a couple of years until someone finally rings us. On a lot of models that exchanger pulls out and rinses under the tap, and if yours does, do it every few months. Read the manual. It is one of the very few maintenance jobs on a dryer that genuinely changes its lifespan.

Honestly, if the room can take a vented dryer and can take the duct, I would take the vented one every time. The condenser earns its keep only where venting is impossible.

Heat pump: expensive, slow, and the one I would buy

A heat pump dryer does not use a heating element at all. It runs a small refrigeration circuit, essentially the same principle as your fridge working backwards, to move heat around inside the machine and pull the moisture out. Nothing goes out the wall and the exhaust is barely warm.

The power difference is not marginal. It is the sort of gap where you can watch a household's summer bill change. Rather than take my word for it, go and put the models you are looking at side by side on the government's energy rating comparison for clothes dryers, because the numbers are there for every unit sold in Australia and they are not subtle.

Three honest catches.

They are slow. A heat pump cycle runs longer than a vented cycle, sometimes a lot longer, because it works at a much lower temperature. Which is easier on your clothes, and irritating if you are drying a uniform at seven in the morning.

They cost real money up front, and the payback maths only works if you actually use the thing. A family drying five loads a week is comfortably ahead within a few years. A retired couple in Kiama drying two loads a month will never see the money back, and I tell them so.

And they are the most expensive of the three to repair. There is a sealed refrigeration circuit in there, a compressor, an evaporator and a condensate pump. A sealed system fault on a heat pump dryer out of warranty is a serious conversation, and on some models it is the end of the machine. The upside is that the failures we actually see most are not the sealed system at all. They are blocked evaporator fins and condensate pumps full of lint sludge, both of which are cleanable and both of which are entirely preventable if you keep the filters clear.

The bit that is specific to here

Salt air is hard on dryers, and the further east and the closer to the water you are, the more it shows. On a heat pump the evaporator is a dense block of thin aluminium fins sitting in the airflow, and out at Warrawong or down the coast that block picks up salt and lint together and turns into felt. On a vented dryer the same air corrodes the element terminals and the cabinet screws.

Garage laundries are the other local pattern. Half the Illawarra dries clothes in a garage, and a garage in July is a cold damp room. Heat pumps in particular do not like it. They are rated for a temperature range and a garage that drops to five degrees overnight pushes some models below it, so the cycle takes forever and the owner thinks the machine is faulty. It is not faulty, it is cold. Keep the roller door shut and it improves.

And if the dryer is wall-mounted, which a lot of them are around here for the floor space, get in the habit of checking the brackets once a year. Rusted brackets let the machine sit out of square and the drum starts rubbing, which is the beginning of the story we told in the dryer hums but the drum will not turn.

So which one

If you have a laundry with an external wall and you dry a couple of loads a week, buy the vented one, duct it properly, and put the money you saved somewhere else.

If you dry a lot, four or five loads a week or more, and you plan to be in the house another decade, buy the heat pump. It will cost you more twice, once at the shop and once if the sealed system ever goes, and it will still be the right call on the power alone.

If the machine has to live somewhere with no external wall and no ducting, that is what condensers are for, and it is about the only reason to buy one.

And before you buy anything, be certain the old one is actually dead. A dryer that has stopped heating is very often a thermostat, a thermal cut-out or a choked duct rather than a machine at the end of its life, and those are inexpensive repairs on a machine that will then run for years. If the thing is only a few years old, do not assume the cost is yours either. Consumer guarantees run on past the manufacturer's warranty, and a dryer that gives up at four is not what a reasonable person paid for.

We repair vented, condenser and heat pump dryers on every major brand across the Illawarra and South Coast, and we will look at the washing machine on the same visit while we are there. Diagnosis and quote before any work starts. The assessment fee is $125 across the Illawarra and $145 further out. Book a repair or call 02 4229 3777.

One last thing, and I will keep saying it until I retire. Clean the filter every load. Not every few loads. Every load. It takes four seconds and it is the difference between a dryer that lasts twelve years and one that lasts six.