I live in Ontario and my electricity is billed on a time of use plan.

I had assumed that one of my biggest electricity users was my vented electric dryer as it has a 240V/30AMP service, and my sub-metering system showed high spikes whenever it ran.

I looked back over the past few days whenever the dryer ran and made a table of the kWh for the last 7 loads.

And based on that average, calculated the cost to dry a load of laundry at each of the three time of use rates

I was a bit surprised how cheap this was. Under 40 cents to dry a load of laundry at the highest time of use rates. It is double the cost to dry at on peak vs. off peak but it is only 20 cents more a load.

Looking back over January it looks like we dried 14 loads of laundry, so if we did all of them off peak we would have saved $2.80/month which is $33.60 a year.

So, drying laundry with an electric vented dryer, which is really the most energy intensive way to dry laundry is surprisingly cheap and while you can save some money by shifting your drying to off-peak times it really doesn’t amount to much.

Also this calls into question the business case for a heat pump dryer as even if they used no energy to dry clothes, it would only save us around $60/year which likely doesn’t justify the additional cost of a heat pump dryer.