Do any of you have knowledge or experience with this?

The local Costco store in Guadalajara has one of these on the floor, and it interests me. The advantages that are important critical to my needs are: (a) non-vented; (b) 115 VAC; (c) compact. Without those three elements, I cannot have any washer/dryer setup, as there is absolutely and positively only one place that a machine can be placed, and 220V is not possible there, nor is venting. Even the washer drain will involve digging up a ceramic tile floor to connect to existing plumbing.

The disadvantages of this machine, as far as I have been able to tell, all center around the excessive drying time (4--6 hours to wash/dry a load) but I live in high desert with hot sunshine at least 320 days a year and can line-dry clothes in a matter of minutes. I can live with that.

It is Energy-Star rated.

Any advice?

tanstaafl.

Wow- washer/dryer combo?
I must live under a rock or something.

I've been wanting to find a good single unit for a while, after seeing the one Julf had at his place. His was much smaller though, top load (I think), and would go into a very fast final spin cycle before running any actual dryer cycle. Seemed much more practical for a single person like myself, instead of a massive washer/dryer setup.

Would you be using the machine drying feature much at all, or clothes-line drying virtually everything?

I had something like this that was built in the 1950s. It was pushing 1000 lbs and was huge and complicated.

My washer in Singapore was tiny, and pumped out through a hose you could snake over to a sink. It's spin cycle was probably 10,000 rpm, so everything came out essentially dry. Definitely the clothes would get wetter just by putting it on and stepping outside.

The thing you linked to is really pricy, I would think something like the singapore washer would be better.

Being lazy, I would be using the machine for most of the drying. Probably the line-drying (actually a folding wooden clothes drying rack) would be used on clothes that weren't quite dry, like waistbands on slacks.

The drying cycle is supposed to be quite energy efficient as it relies on extracting the water and sending it down the drain, rather than using high heat to evaporate the water (540 calories per gram of water!). The end of the wash cycle centrifuges the clothes at 1,200 RPM so they aren't all that wet to begin with.

tanstaafl.

I imagine it probably circulates air from outside in through the clothing during the dehumidification ("dryer") cycle. Given how dry the air normally is in your area, this means it will probably dry things very quickly.

Cheers

I don't believe it does. The dryer is described as "ventless", and if it were drawing air in it would have to vent it out. From what I have been able to infer, the drying cycle is an extraction process, aided by some heat, but the water leaves the machine via the drain, not through venting.

This apparently is more efficient than an evaporative process from an energy consumption standpoint, but less efficient in terms of time.

tanstaafl.

At the risk of turning this into another one of those "North America does what?" threads, which are never very interesting, the device you depict is the normal sort of washer/dryer available over here, and they cost about the same as a normal washer plus a normal dryer. Here is a full page of them, though not all of those are non-vented ("condenser"), and of course none of them, being UK models, are 120V. They certainly aren't thought of as "compact": all washing machines are that size.

I think the ventless drying works by heating the air (so its relative humidity goes down), passing it through the load (so water evaporates into the dry air), then cooling it (using cold water) so it becomes supersaturated and the vapour comes out as essentially dewfall which goes down the drain, then repeating the cycle. It apparently can be designed to use scarcely more electricity than traditional drying, but it does use more water.

Peter