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Comment by gib444 | Hacker News Reader

If electricity gets any more expensive in the UK (it will), I might have to start hand washing clothes!

Your washing machine is likely an order of magnitude more efficient than you. A cycle in my machine consumes something like 0.2kWh.

Last I checked humans don't consume electricity what's-o-ever.

Unfortunately food is not free.

Five finger discount! Or wear some shabby clothes and go to a food bank :)

technically fruit would be free in tropical countries all year round, though in somewhere like Europe you would need to preserve it (drying would be cheapest long term preservation)

Technically I could survive on rats and pigeons, but that strategy doesn’t scale as easily as washing machines and electricity. I would also need to figure out an energy efficient way of cooking them if I wanted to beat the washing machine on emissions.

It is much easier to pick up fruit with zero skills and you can eat it it raw compared to rats/pigeons + it scales with no issues, there is enough fruit for everyone.

I'm pretty sure cities have a lot more calories in form of rats than fruit.

You make a good point but I do have some excess fat stored that I need to shed lol

And 0.2 kWh? Always cold water and barely any spin? I'm firmly middle aged and can't get my head around people washing bed linen etc at cold temperatures and not worrying about dustmites etc.

But maybe it was a lie all along to get us to use more energy.

The European Energy label is based on the "Eco 40-60°C" cycle.

I don't know about 0.2kWh, but I see a machine at Argos claiming 0.33kWh for this cycle.

From what I understand, the dryer is a bigger concern. In the UK and in Europe, you are already ahead of the curve by reducing use of the electric dryer.

A heat pump dryer is 4x as efficient as a resistive electric dryer which would reduce your operating costs by 75%.

The heat-pump crowd never miss an opportunity to spread fanciful figures. They just take the power draw, assume they dry as quick as the old dryers, and multiply time by power to get a nonsense figure. [0]

In the real world, to get my clothes dry, my heat pump dryer uses ~1.5 kWh (at at least 2 hours) vs ~2-4 kWh with an older dryer. Yes, I've used watt meter.

I'm sure /yours/ is magic tough :-)

They're good at reducing peak load on the grid, sure, which is useful.

[0] The manufacturers join in the with this nonsense by lying about the clothes being dry, and gating the "actually dry" setting behind some advanced menu. They expect you to do the last 10-15% of drying in your wardrobe or something.

Any of these that are electric is where your money is going: heat, water heater, air con (if you have it), clothes dryer, oven. Switch them to Russian natural gas for the savings.

But the eco crowd keep telling me that electricity will get cheaper next year!

Hm, come to think of it, they've been saying that for quite a few years now.

Any year now, I'm sure

(I'm not pro-russia)

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