You get really shiny quarters.
Last year our dryer motor died, and as we didn’t have the ready cash to go pick up another one we called my long-suffering brother-in-law, who can fix anything. He took it apart, I found a replacement motor on Amazon (seriously, on Amazon) and we got it back up and drying in a week.
But while he had it apart, we cleaned it out. Aside from a staggering amount of change in and under it — literally enough to cover half the cost of the motor, which just seemed apt — he found about $4 worth of quarters stuck inside the plastic vanes inside the dryer that agitate your clothes. Plus some perfectly round, tightly packed balls of lint, which were kind of cool.
But the quarters had been tumbled for months, possibly years. The lines on the edges are completely gone, rubbed smooth, and the coins themselves have a kind of black lustre to them. These are much cooler looking and feeling than regular quarters, like really, really cheap Kruggerands. They still register as quarters in machines; we dumped the load into a Coinstar for the Amazon coupon and had no problems.
I kept four of ’em, though, ’cause these are seriously cool. Hey, U.S. Mint? Think about it. Buy a bunch of dryers.
Below is the rest of the pile we pulled out of and from under the dryer. It’s an odd savings method, but it seems to work for us.