Saturday, December 14, 2013

Rolling my warm, moist balls around

So my apartment has a pretty small combo washer/dryer, which for the most part isn't a big deal, but combined with the fact that it's ventless, it tends to take basically forever to properly dry clothes and tends to leave them pretty wrinkled.

The problem is that the clothes don't really tumble, pushing hot air around and through the fabric, but instead just basically rotate. This isn't how a tumble dryer is supposed to work.

So the idea came to me to get some of those dryer balls to try to help the clothes tumble properly. I checked amazon and wasn't really too thrilled with what I saw: lots of hollow spiky balls that people complained tended to lose their spikes. After a bit more searching I found some felted wool balls that looked a bit better, but for $30 for a six pack they didn't really inspire me to buy.

Then I thought to myself "I'm a man, I have a perfectly good set of balls I can use", specifically the set of lacrosse balls that I bought a few years back for juggling. They're nice and heavy, rubber, and Canadian, the three qualities that matter the most.

I gave them a try last night, and they seemed to work quite well. The load came out dry after about an hour of drying rather than coming out with damp spots after 2 hours. I'm not sure if they'd make much of a difference in a dryer that isn't painfully undersized, but if you find yourself disappointed with your drying performance, you can do worse than taking a chance on using your balls.