Dryers.
Dryer vents can be easy from the basement. All you need is a 4" hole saw for your drill and you can go through the wood sheathing above the sill plate on top of the foundation. Barring that, you can remove a basement window and replace it with a piece of PAINTED plywood. Just cut as many holes as you need vents.
I don't share vents because of a situation when I was in grad school. I was living in the dorms for my 1st year at the Savannah College of Art & Design (MFA in Historic Preservation) and my dorm had 6 gas Maytag dryers. They all shared 1 huge duct and vent. The problem was that whenever only one or some of the dryers were running, the exhaust would flow back through the inoperative dryers and into the room. This put a lot of moisture through the non-running dryers, put LOTS of moisture into the room, and piped gas exhaust right into the building. After an hour or two of this, the air conditioner would be unable to handle the humidity and would start blowing fog, with a constant stream pouring from the condensation drain tube. The exhaust would give me terrible headaches, and I doubt the depleted oxygen made the gas burners burn any more efficiently or cleanly. I got an apartment the next year.
Electric dryers can be vented inside if the humidity is needed, but gas dryers must ALWAYS vent outside.
Powering dryers can be more difficult than venting. For lots of dryers, I think gas is easier jut so long as you don't go over the capacity of your gas supply line.
Electric dryers each require their own circuit. This can be accomplished by adding big 240 volt breakers to your existing circuit panel or you can add 1 huge 60, 80, or 100 amp breaker to your panel and run a new line to a sub-panel in your laundry room with individual circuits to each dryer socket. Just don't draw more amperage than the master circuit can handle (usually 200 amps on the main for recent construction or updates, and how ever many amps the big breaker that feeds the sub-panel is rated).
Whenever I do electrical work, I tend to over-engineer things. If what I am doing calls for 14 gauge wiring, I usually use 12. My theory is that old electrical systems that historic buildings have (I am a historic preservationist, so I live for this stuff) are inadequate for modern demands and have often deteriorated due to being pushed past their designed capacity. Replacing a 15 amp fuse that constantly blows with a 20 amp fuse or a coin allows the wiring to carry more amperage than it was intended to, which overheats the wires, making the insulation brittle and failure prone. The problem is not the 15 amp fuse, but people trying to pull more than 15 amps through the circuit. To fix the problem, people need to use less power or add new circuits. By over engineering my work, I hope to avoid this problem by using wiring that can handle higher loads than are presently in use.
That was longer than I intended,
Dave
