Dry
Your Clothes for Free
One
of the best ways to control your utility bills is to dry your clothes the
old-fashioned way: on a clothesline. And there are advantages to line drying
besides just saving energy.
Your electric clothes
dryer uses power to both produce heat and turn the drum. Most electric dryers
consume between 800 to 1400 kilowatt-hours per year. Line drying can eliminate
much of this usage and expense.
If
you are fortunate enough to have an outdoor clothesline, you already know that
clothes dried outdoors smell fresher, and they carry less residual odor from
detergents and bleach. And you can often do without bleach when line drying
since the sun will tend to lighten most fabrics. Sunlight has a natural
sanitizing effect, too.
Line-dried clothes
tend to be stiffer than clothes that come out of the dryer. If you’d like some
articles such as your towels to be softer, send them through the dryer after you
take them off the line. Just five minutes on the air-only cycle will do the job.
You can also use an
indoor drying rack instead of a clothesline. This will save you the trouble of
carrying your clothes outside, and you can still dry your laundry during rainy
weather. However, indoor drying may take longer than outside drying, and you
won’t receive the sanitizing benefits of drying in the sun.