Product review (5 stars): Great Little Dryer For Use With Generator Power
After Hurricane Sandy, we were out of power for at least 10 days (we still are as I write this).  Last year, after Irene, we were down for 5 days.  Usually, once we go out in a storm, it's at least a two-day ordeal.  We are fortunate to have a 12kw generator that we bit the bullet and installed about 6 years ago.  After allowing for heat, lighting, refrigerator -- the essentials -- we can use one or two discretionary 1500-watt appliances at a time with it (clothes washer, dishwasher, toaster, "5th burner", etc.), so with some organizing we can approximate normal living.  The one thing we couldn't do was dry clothes, as the typical electric dryer has a 5500-watt heating element and uses more than one-half of the max capacity of our generator just to run.  On short outages, not doing laundry wasn't an issue.  On the longer ones, we were stringing clothes lines up around the house and hanging stuff to dry -- effective, but not optimal.  And it didn't seem worth the significant extra capital (and operating) expense of a bigger generator just so we could dry clothes.  On about the fourth day of no power, with predictions of two weeks or more that we would be out, I got online on my cell phone to see if there was in fact a 120-volt clothes dryer.  I was pleasantly-surprised to find that this item even existed, and happier yet that I could order it from Amazon with Prime overnight delivery.  WOW!  I didn't expect much, and this certainly isn't going to replace our regular dryer, but it makes a huge difference in quality of life when you are hunkered down after a storm.  Almost made me forget about the gas lines!  For a small-to-medium load in the washer, this can dry that in less than an hour.  I just stood it on top of the old dryer, slipped on the exhaust-aimer-thingy pointing upwards, and fired it up.  The laundry room does get a little moist, but nothing bad, and it's easy to clean the lint filters.  Again, it's not so robust a product that I would use it for a regular big Laundry Day every week, but it does a very fine job on the small-to-medium loads that we're doing after the storm.  For this price, it's a no-brainer.