Before receiving these Woolzies wool dryer balls for review, I had some homemade dryer balls.  They were (are) lovely, and I like them…but they don’t compare to these.

The first distinction is that these are very large and dense.  They remind me of snowballs!  See how big this is?

There are several advantages to their size.  One, they don’t tend to get tangled up inside the laundry and “lost”, which always resulted in our inadvertently carrying the others upstairs.  (Then it was anybody’s guess how long it took before we remembered to take them back.)  These are large enough we can just readily find them.

Two, they “toss” the clothes around better.  This makes for a greater difference in drying time, probably means they soften the clothes more effectively (‘though I don’t really have a concrete way to demonstrate this; it just seems logical), and it makes them especially useful when you have a very small load to dry.  Although it’s obviously not very energy-efficient to run an almost-empty dryer, there are times when this is very useful.  Like this week when I was wrestling with a particularly tricky (and large) stain in a baby outfit.  Normally, just an item or two won’t dry in the dryer – they sort of stick to the wall and don’t tumble.  But if you throw the Woolzies in with them, the Woolzies make the clothes tumble, and they dry.

I have not taken the time to do a specific, “scientific” sort of comparison of a load with the Woolzies and the same load without, to compare drying times.  However, it has been my observation that the clothes do, indeed, dry more quickly when we use them.  (I suspect this has to do with the fact that they help separate and tumble the clothes more effectively.)

As for softening…well, I think that’s subjective.  In my experience, tumble-dried clothes are softer than line-dried clothes, regardless of what is or isn’t added to the load.  Are clothes dried with the Woolzies softer than clothes dried without?  Not significantly enough that it’s anything we’ve noticed.  They do seem to help some with static discharge, although nothing (that I’m aware of) will completely eliminate static issues with synthetic-fiber clothing.  (So your best bet there is to stick with natural fibers whenever possible!)  And no icky chemicals!

I really enjoy using these.  We don’t have to add anything at drying time; we just leave them in the dryer all the time.  (I only take them out if I’ve been dyeing clothes or something.)  Their weight enables them to generally just settle to the bottom and/or tumble out of the clothes into the bottom of the dryer as I pull the clothes out, so they’re easy to leave behind when I bring the laundry upstairs.  And I don’t have to replace them.  They’re just easy.