Guides

The cheapest time to run a tumble dryer on Octopus Agile

Last updated: 10 August 2026

If you only ever time one appliance, make it the tumble dryer. A single drying cycle can use more electricity than a washing machine and dishwasher cycle put together, which means the gap between running it at peak and running it in a cheap window is measured in whole pounds a week, not pence.

Why the dryer is the big one

Drying clothes means evaporating a couple of litres of water with electric heat, and that's expensive whatever the clock says. Typical figures per load: a heat pump dryer around 1.5–2.5 kWh; a condenser or vented dryer around 3–4.5 kWh. On an illustrative day peaking at 35p/kWh with a 10p trough, a 4 kWh condenser load costs £1.40 at the peak and 40p in the trough — a pound saved on one basket of laundry. Three loads a week at that rate is over £150 a year, from timing alone.

(A heat pump dryer cuts the kWh themselves by half or more — if you're weighing up a new machine, that saving stacks on top of anything a tariff can do.)

The awkward part: 3h, 6h or 12h — pick one

Where washing machines usually offer a dial you can step hour by hour, many tumble dryers give you exactly three delay buttons — commonly 3, 6 and 12 hours (some models use a different but similarly short menu). You can't aim precisely at the cheapest half hours; you can only ask which of three landing spots is least bad, and the answer changes every day with the price curve:

• Finish dinner at 8pm and the overnight trough starts at 2am? 6h drops the cycle right into it.
• Loading the dryer at 10pm? 3h lands at 1am, probably well inside the cheap window.
• Morning load with a sunny midday dip forecast? 3h from 9:30am catches the solar lull.

This is a genuinely fiddly comparison to do by hand, because each option has to be scored across the whole cycle length, not just its start price. Cheap Hours models fixed-option timers exactly — it scores each button against the half-hourly prices for your region and tells you which one to press, or whether pressing start right now beats all three.

The safety question, answered honestly

Fire services have long advised caution about running tumble dryers while you're asleep or out of the house — dryers generate heat and lint, and lint is flammable. That advice doesn't evaporate because electricity got cheap at 3am. Our honest suggestions:

• Clean the lint filter every load, and the condenser/heat exchanger as often as the manual says. Most dryer risk lives in skipped maintenance.
• Follow your manufacturer's guidance on unattended use — manuals differ, and yours outranks any website, including this one.
• If you'd rather be awake while it runs, you still have good options: Agile's cheap stretch often extends into the early morning, so a cycle set to run at 6–7am can catch low prices while you're having breakfast; and the early-afternoon dip is entirely a waking-hours window.
• A working smoke alarm near the laundry space is worth more than any delay-timer strategy.

Cut the kWh before you time them

• Spin faster in the washer. An extra few hundred rpm of spin removes water far more cheaply than the dryer's heater will. It's the best free upgrade in laundry.
• Use sensor-dry programmes rather than timed heat — stopping at "dry" instead of "an hour of dry" saves energy at any price.
• Batch loads back to back in one cheap window: a warm dryer starts its second load ahead.
• Line-dry when the weather offers — the only truly free window — and use the dryer for the finish.

Keep reading

• The cheapest time to run a washing machine — the first half of laundry day
• Plunge pricing — the days the dryer pays you
• How much can you actually save? — the whole household added up