Anonymous
10-07-2002, 05:39 AM
OK, here are some real world energy usage numbers that are based on my ADC-236 dryers. Over a period of time I had 192,478 dryer cycles of 8 minutes each. That comes out to 25,664 hours of dryer usage. I have neglected the fact that they have a 1 minutes cool down, as it is hard to figure how many last cycles there were. During that same period the total BTU usage for the store (therms converted to 100,000 BTU) was 1,509.4 million BTU. If we convert that to BTU/HR we get roughly 58,800.
Now here is the rub if you would - I have made the totally false assumption that ALL gas was used by the dryers and that no gas was used to produce hot water or heat the store in the winter months. I know this is wrong, but it helps to make my point. Even with that assumption the gas usage is much less than the 80,000 btu/hr rating on the dryer. Thus, dryer gas usage is probably less than half of what the nameplate rating for gas consumption says.
I would assume that the actual gas for the dryers was significantly less than half my total gas usage as for the bulk of this time I was running with a 40 year old water heater rated at 1mm btu/hr and have gas heat in the store.
Now here is the rub if you would - I have made the totally false assumption that ALL gas was used by the dryers and that no gas was used to produce hot water or heat the store in the winter months. I know this is wrong, but it helps to make my point. Even with that assumption the gas usage is much less than the 80,000 btu/hr rating on the dryer. Thus, dryer gas usage is probably less than half of what the nameplate rating for gas consumption says.
I would assume that the actual gas for the dryers was significantly less than half my total gas usage as for the bulk of this time I was running with a 40 year old water heater rated at 1mm btu/hr and have gas heat in the store.