Journal · Regulation
The last winter of the vented dryer
From 19 January 2027, vented, condenser and gas-fired tumble dryers can no longer be sold new in Great Britain. Nobody is coming for the machine you already own — but if a utility room is on your drawing board, the appliance you are designing around is about to change.
On 19 March 2026 the government made the Ecodesign for Energy-Related Products and Energy Information (Household Tumble Dryers) Regulations — SI 2026/318, in force since 10 April. Underneath the dry title is a plain outcome: when the transition period ends on 18 January 2027, the only tumble dryers that can be placed on the Great Britain market as new machines are heat-pump models meeting a new minimum energy performance standard. Vented, condenser and gas-fired dryers fall below the line.
Be precise about what this is not. It is not a ban on owning, using, repairing or selling a conventional dryer second-hand — the rules touch new sales only. The government's own consultation response says the new standard “phases out inefficient gas-fired, air-vented, and condenser models”: only dryers with an Energy Efficiency Index below 85 stay on the market, and in practice only heat-pump machines get there.
The headline facts
from this date, only heat-pump dryers meeting the new standard can be sold new in GB
the rescaled energy label replacing A+++ to D, with a new repairability class
minimum spare-parts availability — drums, seals, motors — after a model is discontinued
government estimate of the running-cost saving over a 20-year machine lifetime
The vent hole was a design constraint
A vented dryer needs a hole through an external wall, which is why so many utility rooms are organised around one. That constraint is going. A heat-pump dryer needs no vent at all — it condenses the moisture out of the air and collects it as water. Which introduces the constraint that replaces it: that water has to go somewhere. Either someone empties a tank by hand for the life of the machine, or the dryer is plumbed to a drain the way a washing machine is.
The dryer stops being the machine you park against an outside wall, and becomes a plumbing decision.
That is a drawing-stage conversation, not a fit-out one. A drain point behind the appliance run costs little when the first-fix plumbing is being planned and rather more afterwards. Heat-pump machines also behave differently in use — they dry at around 50°C where a conventional machine runs nearer 70°C, cycles run longer, and the machines are heavier — all of which bears on where the appliance sits, what it sits on, and how much air the cabinetry around it allows to move.
A label worth reading this time
From the same January date, the label changes too. The A+++ to D scale gives way to a clean A to G, and the new label carries information the old one never did: an acoustic noise class, a condensation-efficiency class from A to D, and a repairability class — a first for GB appliance labels. Behind the label sit new obligations on manufacturers: critical spare parts available for at least ten years after a model is discontinued, repair documentation supplied, and machines designed so key components come out with standard tools.
For a utility room, the useful part is that the label now separates heat-pump machines from one another on the things a small enclosed room actually cares about. Noise matters when the utility sits off the kitchen or under a bedroom. Condensation efficiency — how much of the extracted moisture the machine actually captures rather than releasing into the room — matters in a space with one door and no window; the regulations set an 80% minimum. And the repairability class is worth weighing in a room where the cabinetry is built to last twenty years and the appliance should not be the reason it gets rebuilt.
What we'd take from it
If a utility or boot room is in your plans, design for the machine that will actually be on sale when the room is built: a drain point for the condensate, a housing that lets the machine breathe, and a hard look at the noise and condensation classes when the label arrives. If you are attached to a vented machine — perhaps the vent installation already exists and works — the window to buy one new closes on 18 January 2027, and the second-hand market carries on after that.
The honest caveat: the £910 figure is the government's own estimate, measured over a 20-year lifetime on the standardised eco-programme, and real households run real cycles. The comparison that matters — heat pump against condenser — the same response puts at around £200 over twelve years. Smaller number, same direction. The machines that use the least energy are about to be the only ones on the shelf, and the room they live in deserves to be designed around that fact rather than retrofitted to it.