Gas condensing dryer
Decades ago, John and I happened on an estate sale in Chevy Chase, MD where the children walked away from the house and left it in the hands of an estate sale agent. It was packed, literally. The ladies, whom we got to know, had to clear the living & dining rooms and then work their way through the accumulation in the rest of the house to bring stuff out to sell. When they were able to open the door to the basement stairs, the basement was packed to the ceiling; there were no discernable stairs. As they got stuff out of there, we went into the basement. The early 50s chest freezer was locked, of course, but frost and ice was coming out between the lid and the chest where the gasket was damaged and growing down the side of the cabinet. The husband had made some arrangement with with the vent from the early 50s Bendix gas dryer that looked like he vented it over and down into the laundry tubs. I think there was some cold water tubing involved, but the best we could come up with was that he was trying to condense the water vapor. It was a sad place. He lived there alone after his wife died. He had portable electric space heaters because the furnace was packed away in all of the accumulation. Lots of cookware and utensils were hung from the kitchen ceiling. I don't know if he used the water heater or not. There was a Jenn-Air range in the kitchen, but he had a two element hot plate on top of it so it might have stopped working. The children had watched his derangement grow over the years. They came back for the funeral, but did not enter the house and left the whole thing in the hands of the lawyer. There was some neat stuff buried (literally) there but it took months to clean out the house and each weekend there were more things to look at. It was an estate sale to which they could have sold season tickets, but it did give us a glimpse of an attempt to fashion a gas condensing dryer. It just did not involve an internal condenser.
