Drying washing in the winter can be a difficult, and with the cost of living crisis continuing lots of people are finding it even more difficult as they put the heating on less.
However, Martin Lewis has set out a method that could help dry clothes at home without the radiators being on – and it costs just 7p. The Money Saving Experts explained the tip that can help cut costs as bills soar.
Speaking on the latest episode of The Martin Lewis podcast, he advised listeners when asked about drying clothes. The financial guru explained that using a dehumidifier instead of central heating can be a money saver.
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Martin urged that the device costs just 7p per hour to run. However, the expert acknowledged that the initial outlay of buying a dehumidifier is a lot, but it could be worth it, report Yorkshire Live.
He 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.”
The financial advisor also explained that the same equation can be used to work out if it is cheaper to cook your food in an air fryer, microwave or oven.
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Martin Lewis added: “The problem with the equation for heating equipments is an oven is going to be about 2000W. An 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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