A drying room is a

room In a building or a ship, a room is any enclosed space within a number of walls to which entry is possible only via a door or other dividing structure. The entrance connects it to either a passageway, another room, or the outdoors. The space is ...

intended for

drying Drying is a mass transfer process consisting of the removal of water or another solvent by evaporation from a solid, semi-solid or liquid. This process is often used as a final production step before selling or packaging products. To be consider ...

objects. It can act as a replacement or complement for

drying cabinet A drying cabinet is today usually an electrical machine designed to expedite the drying of items - usually clothing - that are unsuitable for a mechanical clothes dryer. Such items may include delicate clothing care labeled as "hang dry", "dry ...

s, tumble-dryers, and outdoor drying. Compared to outdoor drying, a drying room means one usually does not have to consider the weather forecast in case of rain. In industrial operations, drying rooms are used for drying various materials for several purposes such as the manufacture of products made of wood and paper, as well as the production of food, pharmaceuticals, and ceramic industries. In households, drying rooms are typically used for newly washed clothes, wet training clothes, and any

outerwear Outerwear is clothing and accessories worn outdoors, or clothing designed to be worn as protective layers outside other garments, as opposed to underwear. It can be worn for formal or casual occasions, or as warm clothing during winter. List of ou ...

and are often connected to a

laundry room A laundry room or utility room is a room (architecture), room where clothes are washed, and sometimes also drying room, dried. In a modern home, laundry rooms are often equipped with an automatic washing machine and clothes dryer, and often a l ...

. They can also be found in connection with

changing room A changing room, locker room (usually in a sports, theater, or staff context), or changeroom (regional use) is a room or area designated for changing one's clothes. Changing-rooms are provided in a semi-public situation to enable people to ch ...

s, especially for commuters in commercial buildings. A simple drying room can have clotheslines to hang clothes on, for example, at 30–40 cm intervals. In Japan, a heated bathroom is often a laundry drying room. A drying room can be a living area if, for example, it is combined with a

bathroom A bathroom is a room in which people wash their bodies or parts thereof. It can contain one or more of the following plumbing fixtures: a shower, a bathtub, a bidet, and a sink (also known as a wash basin in the United Kingdom). A toilet is al ...

, or a storage or

utility room A utility room is a room where equipment not used in day-to-day activities is kept. "Utility" refers to an item which is designed for usefulness or practical use, so in turn most of the items kept in this room have functional attributes. A utility ...

if it is primarily a

technical room Technical may refer to: * Technical (vehicle), an improvised fighting vehicle * Technical area, an area which a manager, other coaching personnel, and substitutes are allowed to occupy during a football match * Technical advisor, a person who adv ...

or a

wardrobe A wardrobe, also called armoire or almirah, is a standing closet used for storing clothes. The earliest wardrobe was a chest, and it was not until some degree of luxury was attained in regal palaces and the castles of powerful nobles that sep ...

History

On farms and manors in older times, dried fruit, flax, and other agricultural products were dried over an open fire, which increased the risk of fire, and separate buildings for such purposes are said to have been constructed on farms or manors at a sufficient distance from other buildings.

Brewhouse A brewhouse is a building made for brewing beer and ale. This could be a part of a specialized brewery operation, but historically a brewhouse is a private building only meant for domestic production. Larger households, such as noble estates, o ...

s may be an example of this. Many cabins, kindergartens and workplaces where there are a lot of wet clothes commonly have drying rooms. Some housing associations have drying rooms in

common area A common area is, in real estate or real property law, the "area which is available for use by more than one person..." The common areas are those that are available for common use by all tenants, (or) groups of tenants and their invitees.

s, but many new small apartments do not have drying rooms due to lack of available area.

Modes of operation

The drying mechanisms used in drying rooms can be classified according to: * Drying medium: Hot air, smoke, inert gas,

superheated steam Superheated steam is steam at a temperature higher than its vaporization point at the absolute pressure where the temperature is measured. Superheated steam can therefore cool (lose internal energy) by some amount, resulting in a lowering of its ...

* Operating pressure: Atmospheric pressure, constant pressure, pulsating pressure, vacuum drying, positive pressure drying * Method of

heat transfer Heat transfer is a discipline of thermal engineering that concerns the generation, use, conversion, and exchange of thermal energy (heat) between physical systems. Heat transfer is classified into various mechanisms, such as thermal conduction, ...

: Conventional

convection Convection is single or Multiphase flow, multiphase fluid flow that occurs Spontaneous process, spontaneously through the combined effects of material property heterogeneity and body forces on a fluid, most commonly density and gravity (see buoy ...

(indirect), contact drying (direct),

ultrasonic Ultrasound is sound with frequencies greater than 20 kilohertz. This frequency is the approximate upper audible limit of human hearing in healthy young adults. The physical principles of acoustic waves apply to any frequency range, includi ...

microwave Microwave is a form of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths shorter than other radio waves but longer than infrared waves. Its wavelength ranges from about one meter to one millimeter, corresponding to frequency, frequencies between 300&n ...

infrared Infrared (IR; sometimes called infrared light) is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than that of visible light but shorter than microwaves. The infrared spectral band begins with the waves that are just longer than those ...

ultraviolet Ultraviolet radiation, also known as simply UV, is electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths of 10–400 nanometers, shorter than that of visible light, but longer than X-rays. UV radiation is present in sunlight and constitutes about 10% of ...

dielectric In electromagnetism, a dielectric (or dielectric medium) is an Insulator (electricity), electrical insulator that can be Polarisability, polarised by an applied electric field. When a dielectric material is placed in an electric field, electric ...

electric resistance The electrical resistance of an object is a measure of its opposition to the flow of electric current. Its reciprocal quantity is , measuring the ease with which an electric current passes. Electrical resistance shares some conceptual paral ...

drying. * Desiccant flow method: ** What is being dried stands still or has occasional movements (for example, a

clothes horse A clothes horse is a portable frame, usually made of wood, metal, or plastic, upon which wet laundry is hung to dry by evaporation. Usage and alternatives Clothes horses are a cheap, low-tech type of laundry equipment, in contrast to a clothes ...

) ** The source of movement is the motion of what is being dried ( tumble-dryer) ** The source of movement of the dried material is mainly the kinetic energy of the drying medium ** Mechanical transport, i.e., that the dried material is moved mechanically *** Linear motion (belt, rollers, chain, screw, vibration, rake dryer) *** Rotational movement (tumble dryer) * Frequency: Periodic drying or continuous drying * Installation method: Fixed or mobile

Ventilation

In climates with dry air, natural ventilation can be used to replace moist indoor air with dry outdoor air.

Heat

Some drying rooms have hot air systems, which are energy-intensive and often entail larger operating costs. The heated air is circulated in the room before it is vented out through ducts. It can be assumed that the energy consumption of drying clothes with heating in this way is several times more expensive than washing clothes.

Dehumidification

Drying rooms can be equipped with a

dehumidifier A dehumidifier is an air conditioning device which reduces and maintains the level of humidity in the air. This is done usually for health or thermal comfort reasons or to eliminate musty odor and to prevent the growth of mildew by extracting wate ...

that circulates and dehumidifies the air in the room and provides some heating in the form of

waste heat Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work. All such processes give off some waste heat as a fundamental result of the laws of thermodynamics. Waste heat has lower utility ...

. This can be much more energy efficient than solutions based on heating and ventilation. For the dehumidifier to work effectively it can be beneficial to have a lot of air movement within the room.

Special drying rooms

Various drying rooms exist for specific items, such as clothes, art, wood, or food. Large drying rooms are sometimes used in the industry, for example, in producing timber products. In an industrial context, it can also be mentioned that

stockfish Stockfish is unsalted fish, especially cod, dried by cold air and wind on wooden racks (which are called "hjell" in Norway) on the foreshore. The drying of food is the world's oldest known preservation method, and dried fish has a storage li ...

are dried outdoors.

References

{{Authority control Rooms