Porticos plans greener dryer

A Morrisville company has been awarded $1.7 million in federal stimulus money to design the world's first Energy Star clothes dryer.

Porticos, a 7-year-old mechanical engineering firm, expects to have a prototype of the energy-efficient clothes dryer ready in about nine months.

The 11-employee company has in the past designed cell phones for Sony-Ericsson, hand-held scanners for Motorola and rugged laptop components for Dell.

The federal Energy Star rating applies to appliances, windows and other equipment that meet high efficiency standards. Common appliances with the Energy Star rating include clothes washers and air conditioners.

Clothes dryers don't carry the federal efficiency rating because they are inherently wasteful, said Porticos president Greg Patterson.

A clothes dryer works by sucking air out of the home and heating it up to dry wet clothes. One drying cycle can use up all the air in a 1,300-square-foot home, Patterson said.

Regular drying could burn 100 kilowatt hours in a month, accounting for about 10 percent of monthly energy usage of a typical home that uses 1,000 kilowatt hours a month.

Porticos is working on an electric clothes dryer that will use less than half the energy of current designs. It is designing a model that will reduce the air pressure within the drying chamber, which in turn will require less heat to make the water evaporate.

Staff writer John Murawski