The amazing Dryer Balls

After seeing the adverts on TV for the, “amazing dryer balls” I decided to buy a pair and try them out. They claim to soften fabrics, reduce creases & wrinkles, cut down on lint and save up to 25% on tumble dryer running costs. These are big claims for something costing only around £10.

The hard plastic balls with knobbly bits are designed to “physically break down the stiffness created by water drying in fabric”. You simply place both dryerballs in with the laundry and use the dryer as normal.

Softening clothes

The makers claim that there is no longer any need to add a softening dryer sheet or use fabric softener in your wash. However, even without using dryerballs there is no need to use fabric softener because tumble drying itself softens laundry. It could be that these balls enhance this effect although I didn’t notice a difference in my towels test.

Noisy

The first thing I noticed during the test which wasn’t too unexpected was how noisy the balls are. They make quite a racket bouncing around in the drum. So much so that after the minute I decided to open the door and make sure they weren’t damaging my drum. The noise does die down a little after a while as they heat up and soften a little but they are likely to be quite annoying if you have your tumble dryer in the kitchen.

Listen to dryerballs.mp3 (NOTE: The first several seconds is the dryer without dryerballs inside, then there’s a pause followed by the sound of the dryer with the dryer balls inside. The whole clip is only about 30 seconds)

My experiment is in no way scientific. I simply did the following -

I took a moderate load of towels, put them on a 30 minute cool wash with full spin, then put them inside my tumble dryer without the DryerBalls. The dryer started up with an estimated time of 160 minutes. I monitored the load and started checking for dryness after a few hours and found that they were dry after 165 minutes.

I then removed the towels, left the tumble drier door wide open to cool down, I removed one of the towels for later comparison and placed the rest back in the washing machine on the 30 minute cool wash and spin.

I then placed the remaining towels in the tumble drier and placed the two DryerBalls on top of them. Switching on the dryer displayed the same estimated 160 minutes drying time.

This load appeared to dry in 150 minutes, about 15 minutes quicker. This is nowhere near 25% but it wasn’t far off 10% quicker. It may well be that other fabrics give better results (or maybe worse results) I simply decided to test using towels which are clearly one of the more demanding fabrics tumble dryer has to deal with.

I did not notice any difference in the softness or fluffiness of the towels. I tried a blind test on my wife and she could see no difference either.

I am naturally sceptical about how such a simple idea of a couple of knobbly balls thrown in the tumble drier can offer so many benefits but a rough test did appear to show a reduction in drying time which will clearly save enough money to pay for these balls many times over in the long run.

Written By Washerhelp on May 29th, 2008 with 2 comments.
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