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Posts
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By astrodiaper · Posted
Eating an apple danish right now. I'm not sure what I'm doing when I get off work, aside from calling my dad and an appointment at 8:30. -
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By nickandlucy2 · Posted
Hi all I’m night time incontinent I am wandering what is your go to night time nappy is ? -
Tying up another of life’s loose ends I thought this week I’d close the loop on the great tumble dryer saga. Living as we do, not that far from the tropic of Capricorn in one of the world’s sunniest countries you’d imagine we didn’t need a clothes dryer. Often we don’t. Until we do. Traditionally, we enjoy long, protracted periods of mild, warm or hot sunny weather albeit somewhat disrupted by stormy and monsoonal periods between October and April. Whether it’s climate change or not the fact of the matter is that our locale has all-too-often in the nearly 2 years we’ve lived here, more resembled a kind of Yorkshire but with palm trees. We’ve had bouts of a week or more of endless grey skies and rainfall. During October this year we endured more than 480mm (that’s about 19”) of rainfall! Whilst these kind of epic rain-bearing events aren’t unheard of in our climes, they don’t happen in October. At least I’ve never had to chisel ice off my car windscreen. I’ve done that in Yorkshire. Not fun. An acquaintance who is a climatologist has already cheerfully informed me that if the AMOC current collapses in the northern hemisphere (as it appears to be doing) then our part of Eastern Australia will likely become fully monsoonal and perhaps we’ll be able to farm exotic tropical mildews for cheese. In any case October was squalid. Our house resembled a turn of the century Chinese laundromat: damp washing was draped on furniture in every room with the ceiling fans above them cranked to “cyclone” setting. And me living in nappies (and in particular for 3 days per week, cloth ones) just turbo-charges this issue. 25% of the week’s washing these days are cloth nappies that may neither seen nor smelled by my beloved on pain of social isolation. It was time to deploy (in anger) the dryer I’d given up and bought. I’d chosen a heat pump dryer because: (a) I have invested heavily in solar panels, household backup batteries and high energy efficient appliances and the thought of dissipating 2.4 kilowatts as heat to cook cotton vexes me. And (b) My beloved cares not for (and is indeed, largely unaware of) ANY of this energy saving infrastructure with all energy consumption decisions are conducted on the basis of personal convenience outranking economics and environment. (c) As a result of (b), it is entirely possible that she will just use the tumble dryer and our clothesline will fall into disuse (by her at least). It may not for her be a “sometimes” appliance. She’s NEVER asked why our power bills are usually little-to-nothing more than the standing charges with only minimal actual electricity use despite enjoying a swimming pool, air-conditioning, an EV and a server rack in the garage (ok, the server rack in the garage might be mine). Energy efficiency is my problem. In the interests of that efficiency I chose a heat pump model dryer: a rather expensive “Bosch” with an energy rating of 633 stars (well something ludicrous) that if not built in Europe, then was at least built in a place from where you could drive to Europe. Hanging a heat pump dryer off a wall is out of the question. Unless you live in a medieval castle. They are made from concrete and girders. They are that heavy. Instead, I assembled steel, floor-mounted racking for it in our garage and enlisted help from a neighbour to hoist the thing up onto its new perch. A pile of damp terry nappies was waiting impatiently just out of sight line back inside the house. I saw this as I was helping him heave it into place. Hopefully he did not. There’s no doubt that the heat pump dryer uses massively less electricity: based on household current consumption data (naturally, I have a dashboard for this) I’m estimating that it dissipates around 25 – 30% of the power (kWh) of the resistive-heat clothes cooker we used to have (which died a sad and cruel death through beloved’s wanton lack of mechanical sympathy: a story for another time). Instead of roaring like a jet airliner, the heat pump version sits quietly on its reinforced steel shelf making vaguely refrigerator-like humming noises. Instead of rendering the local atmosphere to resemble a Hong Kong noodle-kitchen in August, it produces little if any discernible heat/humidity output at all. Instead of condensation running down adjacent walls, a demure and discreet catheter-like hose is routed from its nether regions out under the garage door into the adjacent garden. Instead of drip, drip, dripping, this hose will periodically eject a stream of free-water (extracted from drying nappies) in a manner that looks disturbingly like a robot having a pee. Did I mention that it takes 3 days and 3 nights to run a drying load? Well, not quite but 2.75 hours isn’t unheard of. It all depends what the on-board humidity sensor and computer decide. The cycle time is MUCH longer than a conventional dryer. But does it dry adult nappies? Well, yes, kind of. Terry towelling flat nappies are easy: they’re just beach towels with a different form factor (and a markedly less glamorous life). A dryer that couldn’t cope with towels wouldn’t even be a thing but a 1” thick Omutsu waddle nappy doesn’t really have an analogue in a conventional wardrobe. But, even these WILL dry in it. Eventually. By default, you don’t get “crispy dry” on your garments. That whole “Scorched by sun in the Sahara desert” feeling is missing. Garments are delivered with curious tepidity and will be dry as in “no longer wet”. There are a plethora of use cycles selectable on the Bosch control panel and it turns out that there are a series of optional extra cycles that WILL drag your garments drier and drier but they are not on by default. They are also hidden by cryptic marketing-fairy labels. Consider “cupboard dry”, or if you will, “cupboard dry PLUS” modes. The casual consumer, unware of the subtleties and nuance of the marketing fairies would imagine that nappies having been put through a drying cycle would be sufficiently dry to put in a cupboard. Not so. They are sufficiently dry not to feel damp before you next pee in them. Only after running a load with “cupboard dry PLUS” enabled should we consider putting our dried nappies back in our nappy cupboard. There’s also a “hygiene PLUS” mode. If I was in charge of product marketing, I would call this the “Nuke them from orbit!” mode. You WILL get crispy dry nappies with that setting but it involves a serious symphony of fridge noises and a whole afternoon. It’s like Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” but for nappy drying. It isn’t clear to me whether the moisture is driven out of the nappies or simply gets bored and leaves. So this is the setting I use with anything other than simple terry nappies. It still manages to use substantially less power though. There is some material cost (pun intended). Although the marketing fairies claim that the lower drying temperatures are less destructive to fabric there is the question about the amount of time your heat pump tumble dryer will spend destructing them. Sure, it’s thermally less agonising but it goes on for a lot longer distilling the proposition down to a kind of thought experiment: would you rather be tortured intensively for 45 minutes or slightly more lightly tortured for 3 hours? The mechanical stress imparted to ones nappies is all too evident when one cleans the lint filter. Clearly a heat pump drying cycle is kind of like a gym workout for your nappies and weight IS shed. I’ll continue to preferentially line-dry where possible but when the next monsoon rolls in at least I now have options that don’t involve draping nappies over couches and tables beneath ceiling fans and don’t involve large energy bills. -
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