Air Dry Your Laundry Outside

It’s hard to air dry any decent amount of clothes if you don’t have something set up for this. As I said yesterday, please don’t wait for the perfect solution to get started. However, if you really want to make an impact you’ll want to know what contribution you can make by air drying your clothes and what equipment is available and actually works. As a kid all my clothes were air dried. My first home was set up for air drying my clothes, both inside and out – I made sure of it. You’ve come to the right place to hear about this.

Firstly you need to know that several blogs I visited yesterday to explore air drying of clothes gave the tumble drier as the second biggest user of electricity in the home. This morning I’m failing to find any good references to back that up, but if I do I’ll come back and add them. Still, it makes sense to me; tumble driers really must be energy hungry and you can save on electricity cost and CO2 emissions by cutting down or cutting out your use.

Drying outside has many advantages. However, some neighborhoods have banned this option; be sure to check into it before you rush off and spend. This is the way most of my clothes were dried for the first half of my life. In Scotland I had something called clothes poles – they’re cast iron poles set into the ground in concrete with rope strung between them. The best thing about clothes pole drying is that the wind softens up your clothes the same way the tumble drier does. I’ve never seen something like that here in the USA though so I’ll not suggest it as a viable option. The two options I’d recommend are:

1. The umbrella type outdoor drier like this one available at Amazon.com. This looks to be a pretty economic option. From what I remember these do have to be set into concrete so be sure that you’ll be able to take care of installation before committing. I’ve used these and they hold a good amount of clothes, don’t take up much space, and will have your stuff dry in an hour or two (depending on weather). They will hold around one full load of laundry.
2. The Vermont Clothesline Company is selling an interesting looking product. Take a look. It’s rather pricey. I’m not sure how long it would take to recover that cost with electricity savings, but if you can afford it and have the space it looks to be a great option. It does look a whole lot more attractive – I’ve never enjoyed looking at an umbrella type drier.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about options for air drying inside. What do you think? Are you willing to invest the time and money to make this change?

Related posts:

1. Air Dry Your Laundry Round Up #1
2. Green Laundry Challenge #1
3. My Green Improvements List #1