Can I continue to not iron my non-iron shirts?

ZeitgeistHeist

So I'm looking for a new apartment, and many of the contenders this have an all-in-one-washer-dryer magic machine. I kind of like it. But, my boyfriend and I have always lived places with separate washers and dryers, and while I'm open to a bit of change, he's a little disconcerted (picture cat meets vacuum for the first time.) His major issue is that he wears a lot of non-iron dress shirts, which we've always dried in the "normal" dryer and hung up immediately, as per directions. He's worried that this other little machine just won't get hot enough to make non-iron shirts "work right," and that they'll have to be ironed.

Does anyone have experience with these machines? Do you like them? Do they take the magic out of non-ironables?

Ketar

I have a combo washer/dryer unit. If you only do small loads of clothes you can usually get away with putting things straight on hangers without ironing. Emphasis on small loads though. Probably a max of 40% of what you would do in a normal dryer. The unit gets plenty hot, but any larger of a load and you end up with a lot of wrinkles.

Things are even worse if you live in an area with real winters, and thus heavy clothes that need washing. Any more than 2 pairs of jeans with some shirts is asking for pain. A load of pants and sweaters that looks reasonable based on capacity might take 4-5 hours to fully dry.

I wouldn't do a combo unit again, personally. It gets the job done, but only if you're willing to do laundry far more often in much smaller loads than you're probably used to. So glad the house we move into next month has separate units.

Blake T

That's not really true.

They wash the larger load fine.

But their drying capacity is less than their washing capacity.

So often you'll take out the larger items jumpers and jeans mainly in order to dry everything else.

Ketar

Lacking any suitable place to air dry clothes, washing capacity that exceeds drying capacity is utterly useless to me. But it is worth pointing out to someone, I suppose.

Drying capacity for a reasonable finish time is less than half of washing capacity, which is pretty terrible. Actually, not just a reasonable finish time, but also if you want to have non-wrinkled clothes.

Inquisitor77

I don't have any experience with those units, but your boyfriend could simply air dry all of his dress shirts. Then:

1. Wait until they are fully dry and spritz each shirt all over with a water bottle

OR

2. Wait until they are only half-dry ("damp")

...and throw them back in the dryer for a quick finish. Then he can do the whole "no need to iron because they're fresh from the dryer" routine. I'd assume that the combo unit can handle damp dress shirts no problem, in terms of heat - particularly if they're the only things in there at the time. A hair dryer would do the trick as a quick finish as well, but that's a lot of manual work, and he might be better off just ironing at that point. As an alternative to ironing, I use a stand-up steamer, and that seems to work pretty well for all but the most stubborn of wrinkles. Plus, it means that I can cut out at least half of the full wash cycles, which really helps with the longevity of things like dress shirts.