how do All-In-One ventless washer dryers work?
In: Engineering
Most commonly they include a heat pump…. which is just a fancy way of saying it’s an Air Conditioner, but either installed backwards, or capable of running forward and backwards.
See… air conditions make cold air, but they also make hot air at the same time which is why there’s always an outdoor component so the hot air can vent outside. But a heat pump can run in reverse, swapping which side is hot and cold and be used as a high efficiency electric heater as well. So that’s how we’re going to dry the clothes afterwards, taking advantage of the hot/cold split but entirely inside the machine.
The “washer” component is pretty normal here. For the dryer, the heat pump/air conditioner is run such that the hot air goes in with the clothes, and then the cold air is used mainly to dehumidify the moist air. Warm air holds more moisture than cold air, and cooling humid air forces out the water, so we take advantage of this. This air just circulates… gets hot with the clothes and help absorb moisture out of them, then back down underneath to run through cold metal tubes and dehumidify the heck out of it. This moves the water out of the clothes into the bottom area of the machine. Then the water pump removes the water building up as usual, as if this were just the washer’s spin cycle squeezing out water from the clothes and sending that water down the drain.
The water gets evaporated, condensed, and stored in an interior compartment that you have to empty.
I have one and have taken it apart for maintenance before so have a pretty good understanding of how they work. ~~Most the other answers here are incorrect.~~
The way mine (and every other one I have seen) operate/ is that they use a hot wet air- cool dry air cycle to pull moisture out of the clothing. It works like this:
1: blow air over a heating coil to make hot dry air
2: hot air is blown through the clothes as they tumble which picks up moisture, creating hot wet air
3: the hot wet air is then pulled up the back of the machine and sprayed with cold water. this causes the air to cool significantly, and cool air holds less moisture. The result is somewhat paradoxically cold dry air.
4: This cold dry air is then recirculated back around to the heater in step one.
It use condensation to dry clothes. They wash like regular machines, then use a heat exchanger to cool the hot, moist air from the clothes, converting it to water that drains away.
Latest Answers