You Know You Live in an Old House When
You start by shopping for new appliances. You end up calling an electrician to re-wire your house.
We shopped yesterday for a new washer/dryer. Simple, right? Look at Consumer Reports, visit recommended stores, choose, buy, wait for delivery.
BUT we have a gas dryer. And a gas dryer costs $50 more than an electric one. Plus, the city of Minneapolis is very strict about who can fiddle with gas lines, so stores will deliver but not connect in the city. Instead, we’d have to pay to have the current dryer disconnected, then have the new dryer delivered and the old one taken away, then pay again for someone to come and connect the dryer to code.
What a pain, we thought. Let’s just get electric. Until we looked at our electric box and realized a few things. We are at maximum capacity, and a ridiculous number of things seems to be on one breaker. So I’ve called an electrician about getting an upgrade.
That still leaves the question of gas versus electric dryer. As the energy guy noted today during the audit of our house, it doesn’t make financial or common sense to use fossil fuel to generate electricity to run an appliance that can be run on straight fossil fuel without the conversion. So–get electric and avoid the $50 cost plus the costs of de- and re-install? Or go with the “practical” choice? Also, can we get this done by the time Drake’s little brother arrives? Stay tuned. It’s an adventure.
January 16th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Goodness. Get the gas dryer. To my knowledge, electric doesn’t touch gas when drying clothes.
And don’t get the LG W/D that looks like the whilrpool or whoever’s else. My inlaws have them and they were not nearly so quiet as they could have been. I think CR recommended the Maytag Neptunes.