Gas Dryer..Will It Change My Life?
My wife wants to "Do Her Kitchen." I have been told you often have to upgrade your electrical to deal with this. We have 100 amps and to upgrade to 200 amps we have to pay to have the village dig a trench. It will cost five thousand dollars. One fellow suggested buying a gas dryer. He said that the electrical savings would allow us to upgrade the kitchen without blowing the place up. Comments?
Answer:
I am retired (27 years) from a company that sold many (many, many) appliances. I don't have specifics but will make a wild guess that they sold 25 - 30 electric dryers to one gas dryer. At one time the company would not install (they wouldn't even set it inside uninstalled) a gas dryer in a mobile home, I don't know if this was because of a law or that the company didn't want the liability. I was told that the reason was that a gas dryer would burn too much oxygen out of the air. I personally wouldn't have one in my home.. The fellow is right. The big loads in most homes are the dryer, stove, oven, water heater, space heating, air conditioning, and hot tub and pool heating. All but the air conditioning can be done with either gas or electric. If no more than one of these is electric in your house, it is unlikely you will exceed the capacity of a 100a service. The thing to do is to have a local electrician do the calculations found in NEC article 230 to determine for certain whether or not the existing service will be adequate for your proposed configuration. (You can do this yourself, but it isn't simple.) In this area (Middle California) gas energy is much less costly than electric energy (Why?), and has been so for many years. Many homeowners replace electric major appliances with gas for just this reason. I believe you will find no significant difference in safety or reliability between the two energy sources if the electric or gas connections are professionally installed and normal maintenance (like cleaning the lint filter each load, for example) is done.