Washing and Drying
Wash at 30ºc
Why?
Washing clothes at 30ºC instead of normal temperatures means you use 40% less electricity, saving an average of £10 a year on your electricity bill. If every household in Devon washed at 30ºC instead of 60ºC, together we could reduce our emissions by a massive 250,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.
How?
Wash loads at 30ºC and make it extra efficient by making sure you always wash full loads of clothes and wash on the eco mode where possible, if your machine has one.Â
Hang dry your clothes
Why?
Tumble dryers are incredibly energy-hungry appliances. An average drying-machine cycle uses just over 4kWh of energy and produces around 1.8kg CO2. That’s costing £1.20 per cycle at the 2022 price-cap prices.
How?
Keep your eye on the weather forecast and plan to do laundry on dry days so that you can hang your clothes outside. Even in the winter, days with bright sunshine or a northerly or easterly wind, which bring dry air to the UK, will get your laundry mostly dry.
If you have to do laundry on wet days, dry clothes inside on a clothes rack – open the windows slightly in that room to help the moisture escape and close the door.Â
If this doesn’t’ work for you, consider investing in a heated airer. These which dry your clothes faster than a clothes rack but are more sustainable than a dryer because the waste heat contributes to heating your home rather than being vented outside.Â
If the tumble dryer is a necessity, using a lower temperature to dry the load, a Heat Pump tumble dryer offers the most efficient performance of the different types available. It takes an A++ Heat Pump dryer approximately 5 minutes extra to dry a 1 kg load, but it uses less than half the energy of a B-rated condenser dryer.
