We had an electric dryer when we moved into this house. But luckily for us there was a capped gas line right behind the dryer so it was easy to switch. Our primary reason was to save money. See how much it would cost to switch to gas. The installation cost might be higher than what you'd save depending on how many loads a week you do, the size of the dryer, how well your washer spins the excess water out of your clothes before they go into the dryer, how long you'll be in the house etc.

If you buy a new dryer look for one with a moisture sensor because then the dryer won't continue to run after the clothes are dry.
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this is from www.consumerenergy.com

Electric vs Gas

All dryers use a small electric motor to turn a large drum that tumbles the clothes placed inside it. All of them have an electric fan, which distributes heated air. There are however, two ways to create the heat needed to efficiently dry clothes - using either gas or electricity.

Electric dryers use heating coils to supply heat. Most electric dryers operate on 240-volt current, twice the strength of ordinary household current. If your laundry area is not equipped with a 240-volt outlet, you must have one installed.

Gas dryers use a gas burner to create heat, but otherwise they operate the same as an electric dryer. Your laundry room must have a gas hookup, with proper connections and safe venting of the gas's exhaust, in addition to an electrical outlet.

The connections you have in your laundry room will probably dictate which style you use. If you have both gas and 240-volt connections, consider that gas dryers cost more to begin with - approximately $50 more than the comparable electric model. But in most areas gas dryers will cost less to run over their lifetime. Generally speaking, the cost of electricity needed to dry a typical load of laundry is 30 to 40 cents, compared to 15 to 20 cents if you use gas.

The energy efficiency of a clothes dryer is measured by a term called the energy factor. It's a rating somewhat similar to miles per gallon for a car - but in this case, the measure is pounds of clothing per kilowatt-hour of electricity. The minimum energy factor for a standard capacity electric dryer is 3.01. For gas dryers, the minimum energy factor is 2.67, and, yes, the rating for gas dryers is provided in kilowatt-hours, even though the primary source of fuel is natural gas.

Conventional wisdom that gas is cheaper than electricity is not always the case. From my calculations the only place this seems to be true is in New England where there is little modern cheap electricity production.

Where I live in the southeast GAS is easily more expensive per BTU of energy consumed probably because we have access to realatively cheap hydro and nuclear power. We are also closer to the stockpiles of gas in Texas and it still doesn't make a difference.

Bottom line is , you'll have to do some tedious calculations in order to really figure out IF a gas dryer will save YOU money.

Conventional wisdom holds true in California as well. If running a gas furnace is significantly cheaper than an electric heat pump, then for sure a gas dryer is cheaper than an electric one.

In my area a therm of gas is about $1 and contains 29.3 kwh, or $0.03 per kwh. There's some slight efficiency loss in turning the gas into heat, but probably not much.

Electricity is about $0.11 per kwh. However, once you get above a certain baseline allocation, which most families would, it jumps to abou $0.25 per kwh.

So can be nearly 4X-10X more expensive to generate dryer heat with electricity. The dollars will only add up though if you do a lot of laundry. In our two-person household we only do 2-3 loads a week, so it wasn't a big factor, but we ended up with gas after a remodel as we got a deal at the time on the gas dryer for no more than an electric one.

antts, I think the conventional wisdom actually holds in most places. We do have access to cheap hydro power here in the Pacific Northwest but natural gas is still cheaper - in fact, it's not close. In fact, propane prices are low enough right now that even propane is generally cheaper than electricity. At between $1.00 to $1.30 per gallon depending on delivery size, it's in the neighborhood of 4 to 5 cents per kWh equivalent. Natural gas is cheaper yet.