natural gas is still a better way of curing shirts. I am not familiar with forced air electric, but I imagine they could use the same idea as gas. Radiant panels just don't heat through the garment like forced air gas does.
I wouldn't hold my breath on electric solar panels, it will be a while before really good ones are really cheap. I think we are still around 10% efficiency on them.
I did see a really cool one that reminded me of a vertical stat camera. That was was supposed to be really good, but it was expensive, the best part was it was about the size of an exposure unit. They were thinking a few dozen of them on top of a Wal-Mart could power the whole thing.
I don't know if the project died or was shelved or what.
I agree on all of the above. Not experienced with the gas but anyone who's replaced a gas dryer in the home with an electric one will find themselves strongly advocating the clothes line, I know that for sure.
From a real basic viewpoint though, you can make hot dry air with electric or gas all the same, it's
hot,
dry,
air. Do the laws of physics really care how it was generated? I don't think there's anything magical about using gas to generate it, it just happens to cost less right now and is likely fundamentally more efficient because it's creating the "product" - hot, dry, air - as a natural by-product of the combustion process I would imagine.
Solar has a lot of grants that the install companies will help you obtain or so I hear, and offsetting the install cost might make it a more feasible concept. We're finally getting close to the end of negotiating our new shop space and I plan on calling one of 'em up just to see what the word is. My guess is we'll never recover the install cost in a short enough time to justify blowing all that capital on it but ya never know.
