Frugality in Practice: Air-Dry Your Clothes (Even Indoors!)
Published on - July 12th, 2008 (by J.D. Roth) Tiffany wrote with a quick energy-saving tip:
I hang up my wet clothes inside during the day to let them dry. When I get home from work, I put them in the dryer for about five minutes to get rid of the wrinkles. Â I don’t have a clothesline, but this works just as well.
I’m not familiar with hanging clothes to dry indoors, but I like the idea. Kris and I have actually begun experimenting with hanging our clothes outside. We had a failed attempt earlier in the year (line was too long, and it rains in Oregon). But now Kris has created a makeshift clothesline running from the maple tree to the raspberry arbor:
I’d like to install something more permanent. Some of our neighbors have real clotheslines, and maybe someday we will too. Fortunately, the internet is full of advice, so when the time comes to build one, it’ll be easy to do.
Here are some resources about air-drying clothes:
- Tip the Planet: All you ever wanted to know about air-drying your clothes
- Michael Bluejay: Tips on saving money on clothes drying
- Life in a Nutshell: How to build your own clothesline
Not everyone likes a clothesline. For them, Tiffany’s indoor drying tip could be a great alternative.
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I love using my 40 foot retractable clothesline that I found at Lowes. I have it installed on one side of my balcony with some hooks on the opposite side so I can pull out the line and then backtrack so I have 2 rows of clothesline. When I’m not using it, it’s retracted and out of the way and stays clean and protected from the weather. It comes with some clothespins; however, I prefer regular wood & metal spring clothespins.
Here’s what it looks like:
http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=productDetail&productId=159213-11112-R-400L
When it’s raining outside I can hang clothes (on hangers) on the top of the inside doorframes. I also have a loft area with a banister railing that works perfectly as a hanging spot.
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J.D., would you talk about couples and finances? Do you and Kris keep your finances separate?
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Sometimes Mother Nature works against you. I’ve tried setting up a clothesline, but the local chipmunks, squirrels chew the line and birds flying over have a tendency to, ahem, negate the cleaning process.
I bought a drying rack at a local hardware store that works just fine. If I’m in a bind and need something to dry faster, I set up a fan in front of the drying rack. I’ve been able to dry wool sweaters overnight using this technique.
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A couple of pointers based on your photo:
1. For heavy items like towels, peg as close to one end of the towel as you can, leaving a greater amount of single layer of fabric: a doubled over towel will take twice as long to dry.
2. Always wash your clothes inside out and hang to dry inside out: the sun will fade the inside of your garment (which noone will see) rather than the outside.
3. Before pegging out T shirts, fold with the shoulders together, then grab the bottom edges and give a yank downwards to straighten the seamlines. And don’t stretch the bottom across the line otherwise you’ll end up with flared T shirts!
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We don’t have a dryer at all. I dry our clothes outside in summer, and on drying racks inside during winter. Cheap and better for the environment.
With the amount of greenhouse gas a dryer produces it might be time to start challenging your homeowners’ association’s covenants for the sake of the environment.
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People who have pollen allergies or live in high-pollution areas have a very real problem drying clothes outside at all. With my allergies, outdoors line-drying of any kind (especially for bed linens or nightclothes) simply is not possible for me. Instead, I’ll dry anything that isn’t sheets or towels on drying racks inside, and put the sheets/towels into the dryer for a short spin. Best of both worlds, and it means that I can breathe at night.
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Luv hanging up my clothes. I found an inexpensive clothes rack at Target, which resides near the washer in the garage. Also I strung two lengths of clothesline between wood hooks screwed into the rafters over the westside deck. This shelters the clothes from most birds and to some extent from any snobbish neighborly gaze. Sometimes, too, I’ll put damp clothes on plastic hangers and hang them from the door frames inside the house.
When I was a kid, clothes hangers were made of steel, which rusted. So you couldn’t hang damp laundry on them. But with plastic hangers…ta da! True wash-n-wear! If you take a knit shirt and carefully align the shoulder seams along the hanger, you can put the hanger up anywhere–on a line outside, on a rack, or over the doorframe. Check the label, though: if it says “dry flat” it may stretch out of shape if hung to dry.
I sling my jeans over two hangers, one leg over each hanger, and hang them so maximum air can circulate around the garment. If I feel industrious after they’re dry, I iron them. If I’m rushed or lazy, I toss the dried pair of jeans in the dryer for five minutes or so, which shakes them soft and eliminates most wrinkles.
So quiet! No motor running, no bumping and thumping, no nerve-grating buzzer. Ahhh!
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Forgot to add – for the person concerned about the water from drying clothes inside getting into the walls and floors, it’s not like they come out of the washer sopping wet. The humidity’s no worse than what you get from having a goldfish bowl, particularly in winter when you’ve likely got the heating on which is drying out the air.
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I’ve air dried my clothes the entire time I’ve lived alone. I hate spending money on apartment dryers. Plus I figure it must help my clothes last longer.
We always dried out clothes outside in the warm months. Now my parents have the HE washer and dryer, and I don’t know if my mother still uses the clothesline. I’m in Canada.
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I’ve been air drying my clothes for the last 30 years. Put shirts on hangers and place on shower rods. Since my w/d is in the garage, I also have a clothes rack for underclothes, sox, pants, etc. Sheets go on the shower rods, too. The only things I really use the dryer for are towels because I don’t like the way they feel when they are air dried.
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I have to say this post made me laugh. Living In Australian air drying clothes outside is just a way of life. I know plenty of people who don’t own clothes dryers but I don’t know anyone who deosn’t have a clothesline. I don’t have a dryer and everything of my husband’s and mine is either dried on our line in our tiny courtyard or hung over the stair rail and a small rack inside. I’ve never really thought of this as being frugal- its just the way things are. It can be a bit of a pain in winter and in summer Sydney has a very high rainfall (even higher than London) but nothing beats white sheets that have been been dried in the sun .
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I saved a whole $85 a year by line drying. Is it even worth the hassle?
Betty
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These are all splendid ideas. But I have to schlep my laundry to another town to use the laundrymat. I’m not going to wash them and then schlep them all wet back to my apartment to hang them up in my tiny apartment. Sorry. If I ever own a home, the first thing I’ll build is a clothes line. In the meantime, it’s the laundrymat for me.
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My mom lives in a historically rural area that is becoming increasingly developed. She has always line-dried her clothes outside, but some of her new neighbors are now complaining about how clotheslines make the neighborhood “look poor.” My mom says that in her neighborhood, you can’t tell the poor people from the millionaires, but you can spot the people with no sense a mile coming.
Where I live now, our homeowners association forbids outdoor clotheslines, but they allow draping wet items over deck railings to dry as long as those items are left for no longer than 48 hours. So I drape our laundry over the deck railings. It looks incredibly trashy, but it beats using the clothes dryer, which not only uses energy itself, but also makes our small house so uncomfortably warm that we end up running the air conditioning, too.
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I’m the same, Beth. The poor college students line up near the top made me laugh because poor college students don’t have money for their own washer, tend to wash everything at once (yesterday, I filled five washers and two dryers, plus two drying racks at home), and do not have space for a drying rack. It’s cheaper to spend 25c/7min than to move to an upscale apartment with its own coin washer in the kitchen.
A couple friends of mine have a clothesline in their backyard, but they never use it. When they do, they get little black bugs in *everything*.
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Having grown up in the UK, everyone (as I remember it) had an outdoors clothesline and no one had a dryer. We made it work even in that extremely unpredictable weather. I started hanging our clothes out to dry about a year ago. I feel like the neighborhood renegade but that’s fine! I’m sure by now the neighbors are used to seeing my grogs out on the line and I don’t care. I’m saving money and resources and I feel totally fine with that. I am looking for a smaller house to buy and one of the factors that will clinch the deal for me is having somewhere for a “washing line” as the Brits call it. Once you go “clothesline” you should never go back!!!
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I dry light duty stuff indoors, on a $20 wood rack from Target. In addition, I have a box fan setup to speed up drying process.
Heavier stuff, like cotton blanks, towels, and blue jeans still go to a real dryer, otherwise they might pickup mildew. I don’t care about mild mildew odor, but some family members have complained in the past.
At a minimum, air drying color clothing makes them last longer, so you could save substantially by not replacing clothing so often.
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JD, thank you for this suggestion! I’m ashamed to admit that, although I’m very energy frugal in most ways, line drying my clothes had not occurred to me, even though my family had a rotary clothes line (like Elkit linked to) when I was growing up. But since I live in Texas, where the average summer temperature is 95+, and have a big back yard, I have the perfect set up for line drying.
So today I have spent the afternoon going out to the garden to dry sheets and clothes. The sheets dried in less than an hour in the hot breeze, the shirts and shorts are taking about 2 hours.
I have been really enjoying the experience – especially listening to the birds as I put up the items. I often avoid going outside in the summer because “it’s too hot” but today it’s over 100 degrees and it’s perfect out. Maybe handling the damp laundry makes me feel cooler.
I’ve also noticed that the A/C is running a lot less than it usually does on laundry day – I guess in a hot climate that it’s pretty stupid to run an appliance that generates heated air while running another that generates cooled air.
And yes – my neighborhood association covenants ban clotheslines, but I don’t care. They also ban pick up trucks and lots of people have those. I really like the suggestion about getting the city council to rule that such bans are illegal – Austin is set on becoming one of the greenest cities in Texas, and line drying our clothes fits in with that goal!
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I dry some bulky items outside, like comforters or large beach towels. I still use the clothes dryer for most items. I wonder how many people grew up using a clothesline? My parents didn’t and I’m sure this has an impact for many.
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We hang clothes on plastic hangers on a regular closet pole running across the laundry room. Very cheap, takes up much less space than a clothes rack, and dries more at a time than a clothesline. Works year-round, in any weather, too, though really humid days can be a problem.
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I have a foldout drying rack that I got from Target, and I use it to dry just about everything indoors.
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In Hungary, we use drying racks. They’re great. Most people don’t have dryers. I’m visiting my mother in America right now. She has a dryer. I find it very inconvenient actually.
The way it works in Hungary, is that I have a washing machine. It is very loud, especially at the end when it gets the water out as best it can. I can hear from any part of the apartment that it’s doing this and can hear it stop. Then I hang the clothes on the drying rack where they don’t get wrinkled and I can hang them up at my leisure over the next few days, or return to the drying rack for clothes when I want to get dressed in the mornings.
The way it works in America is that my mother has a washing machine. I put clothes in it and detergent and turn it on. It is very quiet. I can’t hear when it stops working so I forget to take the clothes out. Eventually, I remember and put them into the dryer. The dryer is also very quiet and I can’t hear when it stops. I go to the dryer when I want to get dressed and take out some wrinkled clothes and put them on.
Very inconvenient. Without a dryer I can have unwrinkled clothes hanging, waiting for me to put them away at my convenience. But a dryer wants me to sit and watch it dry (because I can’t hear it stop) and then put clothes away immediately (not at my convenience). Maybe I should buy my mom a drying rack. I didn’t know they had them in America.
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We’ve been using a drying rack for years. Besides saving some electricity, it also makes sure your clothes don’t shrink. If you have a bunch of little (but growing) kids around, to have your clothes shrinking is not good.
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When I lived in Germany, there were lines in the boiler room of the apartment building where we hung stuff in damp weather, which worked nicely.
For mystified foreigners, the contemporary US attitude is that a house is an “investment” and its resale value must be protected (Americans tend to move a lot). I stay the heck out of those kinds of neighborhoods, myself–when a neighborhood has been there for fifteen years and the houses still all look alike, that’s just plain creepy.
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I hate line dried clothes. They feel stiff and smell funny. I hated having to put up everything after the wash cycle. I like my HE dryer much better!
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I also agree that using a dryer, even for a short period is helpful for softening the clothes and also getting out wrinkles. I’m sorry, I do the laundry, and don’t like to iron! Fortunately we have a front loading washer that is so effective at wringing out water, it only takes 10, 15 minutes in the dryer to dry most everything. For stuff that takes longer or I’m not worried about wrinkling, we have clotheslines in our back screened porch, plus use our bed, hang up clothes on hangers to flat dry or line dry items inside the house. A screened in porch is a great alternative because it is not as noticeable as outside lines but you still get the benefit of the (free) warm air.
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I highly recommend drying racks with vinyl-coated rods (available at BB&B or LnT). My all-wood ones mildewed with heavy use, even when I rubbed them with sandpaper.
I’d love to line-dry clothing, but our woodsy area means bird turds galore.
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We have line dried our clothes indoors for years. We put them on hangers, hang them in the closet and leave the door open. We’ve never had a problem with mildew either. From time to time during the summer we have hung the clothes in a bathroom which cools it off very nicely.
I have to agree with Jesse. My husband was the one who initially insisted we do this since we had to make the kids’ clothes last as long as possible. Not using the dryer helps prevent against shrinking, fading and premature wear.
We still use the dryer for linens, socks and underwear.
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If I leave even slightly moist clothes out, they mildew and mold, what would prevent this from occuring on a line? Is this just not going to happen down here in this humid crescent city?
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I had put my clothes outside on the line to dry but I’m going to stop that now,,reasons:
1. My Clothing are going to fade.(of the sun)
2. Some of them say DRY IN THE SHADE,, and there is a lot of sun here because I live Aruba.
So I’m not going to take the risk of letting my clothing get faded or such as. So the dryer’s for me.
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I’ve always dried delicate clothes indoors, which ver the years has expanded to include all of my teeshirts (they’re fitted and I don’t want them to shrink) and jeans (since they have spandex in them these days). I dry underwear and bras draped over the frame of my IKEA laundry bag (it has a removable bag), and now I have a canopy bed and one day realized — hey! Fantastic laundry bar on all four sides! But the shower rod is just a way of life to me, since my mom always dried delicates that way. Just lay ‘em on the toilet or smoosh them together on the towel bars when you need a shower; fifteen minutes won’t kill them.
Towels, shirts and my husband’s cotton shirts and pants go in the dryer, though, because like someone says above I don’t have the time to iron. My in-laws live in Spain and line-dry everything, and watching her iron *sheets* was depressing.
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My boyfriend and I have to go to a laundromat because we don’t have a washer and drier. We wash all of our clothing in one load on delicate with warm water, then we throw everything in the dryer for 7 minutes to soften them up and release the wrinkles. This all costs $2. We don’t have many white items, mostly darker things or brights.
We have a converted room in the attic of our apartment which has a bay window and excellent ventilation. Along with growing our vegetables up there, we have strung a cheap vinyl rope zig-zag across the room. We hang our clothes there and they dry within the day.
I don’t know about big cities here in the States, I have always lived in the country, but most people I know use a clothesline at the very least in the summer.
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I’ve recently discovered the joys of line drying, since I am using cloth diapers on my newborn. The first time I dried them in the dryer, they took over an hour on high to dry. Since I wash the diapers every other day, I knew I had to find a better solution or my gas bill would be sky high. If you put them on the line, they are dry in only a few hours, plus the stains come right out. Then I stick them in the dryer for ten minutes to make them softer for my son’s bum!
At first I was worried that my city had some sort of ordinance against outdoor clothes lines. So I bought two retractable clothes lines from Walmart that we installed on our deck. No one can even see them.
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We love our Breezecatcher http://www.mossbackfarm.com/archive/000226.html
In Oregon, we find June-Sept, generally no problem to dry outside. Some of May, and some of Oct, mostly ok. The rest of the year, not so much…..
The only downside can be that the clothes get a little crunchy…my wife likes her towels (and the baby’s diapers) soft, so some things may get tossed in the dryer for a brief spell to soften them up.
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I live in Beijing, where every apartment comes with an enclosed terrace for the purpose of drying clothes indoors. Mine even comes with a set of adjustable clothing rails that I can pull up and down to catch the sun. My friend in rainy Scotland also had a similar system, conveniently positioned right above her washer.
When it’s very humid, as it is right now in the midst of Beijing’s rainy season, we simply open our windows and let the air circulate, which takes care of potential mildew. (Although, for us, we have problems with the city’s notorious pollution.)
In the past I’ve also had the drying racks, and they are great. My clothes smell nice and the racks fold up neatly.
I’m finding this thread to be very interesting for its cultural insights, because even though I’m American, I did not know that it was not the done thing in America to dry clothes outdoors. I grew up in Southern California, and we’ve never had a dryer. On the other hand, we never had to–it was sunny 90% of the time and we just hung our clothes up in the clothesline in the backyard.
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When my hubby and I bought our first house earlier this year, it did not come with a washer and dryer. We opted to buy an Energy Star washing machine, and the rather steep (for us) price tag on that ensured that we couldn’t afford a dryer. We’ve been air-drying our clothes ever since, and have no plans to buy a dryer. Even here in the humid Southeast, it works perfectly.
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yet another person who uses an indoor clothes drying routine. I’ve dried my clothes only three times this year (and all of these were times when I was housesitting). I use a flat folding “mangle” from ikea to hang up one load at a time. I’ve also got a little over door rack from Ikea that folds down when I need it, and I use that for socks.
When I studied abroad in the Netherlands, we didn’t even own a dryer, so I got in the habit of hang drying stuff there. Same deal with my brother when he studied abroad in New Zealand. Seems like the US has quite different habits from the rest of the world, as even my fairly eco-friendly friends can’t believe I don’t use a dryer more regularly.
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I like to hang dry my clothes for various reasons, and what works for me is that I put clothes on wide plastic hangers…..
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If I hang out my clothes, someone will steal them. I own a home in an urban area; ah, the beauty of city life!!
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We dry our clothes inside, pretty much exclusively. The only time we use the dryer is for sheets and towels (mostly because we don’t have space to dry them once the clothes are up).
We bought two Ikea drying racks and they’re wonderful. I can only imagine how much money we’ve saved in the last year.
We only had a washer and used the dryer in the building. Now that we have both, we still hardly use the dryer.
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Reading all these comments make me realize how privileged I’ve been, having a dryer or access to one all my life. I hang most of my laundry now, but I have to admit it’s not so much about saving money as it is about saving energy. My true motivation, though, the part that makes me keep at it when it would be easier to throw the laundry into the dryer, is nostalgia: I feel a connection to my grandmother and her mother and beyond when I hang my laundry. Also, while I hate folding and putting away, hanging the laundry feels like a break from other chores. I like the repetitive lift, shake, pin, lift – it’s almost meditative.
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I’ve been told drying your laundry outside is supposed to be healthier than using a dryer. Apparently the sunlight helps to kill some germs. Plus just having the laundry aired outside does seem to make a difference to how fresh the laundry seems to be when it’s dried.
I try to limit use of the dryer to when I have no choice.
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Being from a country where line-drying is the norm, I wonder where is the “hassle”. It takes 5 minutes to hang them and you just need a little room to do it not even that much. My house is very small and in winter I manage to do it in my bathroom!
You can wait some time for the clothes to dry, can’t you? The dryer seems like an unnecessary luxury to me.
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I have a drying rack for inside the house, because our mobile home park does not permit outside clothes lines. I have always done delicate and personal items this way, as they last longer.
I got the drying rack at a garage sale and I bought some wooden clothes pins.
I tend to be careful about how much laundry I do, anyway, but this helps reduce it further.
(When I was in an apartment, I hung them in the shower.)
Anything made of nylon (bathing suits, undergarments, pantyhose) will last much longer and won’t pill. Bras will not loose their shape, or underwire.
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The clothesline is a great idea for saving money. However, if you are allergic to anything outdoors, that could be a bad idea. When wet clothes are outside, pollen and other dusty things stick to them easily. I like the idea of drying them indoors better!
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I live in Brazil and they have these great retractable clothes lines that can be installed in the laundry room..takes no floor space….
Just to give you an idea I put a link below
http://www.varalkit.com.br/varal_teto.gif
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incidentally, we’ve begun to try air/sun-drying our clothes outside too instead of using the dryer!
http://www.financialwellnessproject.org/2008/09/08/sun-drying-my-clothes-to-save-a-bit-of-energy/
it is actually somewhat fun — we get to be out in the sun for sure for at least a few minutes, a tiny bit of exercise, and saving energy. it is quite satisfying.
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You could air dry your clothes indoors throughout the year, even if you think you don’t have space for a drying rack.
Take a look at the unique Ceiling Drying Rack at http://www.airdry.org
It’s a drying rack that you can use all year to air dry your clothes. It attaches to the ceiling and let you dry your clothes by pulling them and hanging near the ceiling. It doesn’t take any floor space and I have mine installed in a laundry room near washer/dryer. It’s kind of hard to describe without seeing, but you can take a look for yourself at their website http://www.airdry.org. I was able to reduce the use of my electric dryer by at least 75%, not too mention it’s also so much more gentle on your clothes.
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I find it depressing that drying your clothes on a line is associated with being “lower class”. My parents have always hung clothes outside to dry (in Yorkshire) and the dryer is really a last resort when there’s not enough space on the airer and it’s too wet to put out the laundry. I lived in a flat with no outside space and dried an absolute minimum of jeans and towels, simply because otherwise they would take too long to dry and smell musty. Everything else went on my cast-off airer (it had been my mothers, and was in perfect condition until my housemate started using it…now it looks a bit crippled, bent and old!) or over a radiator. Long live the washing line!
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This seems to be a novel idea here…..We have known this idea and put it into practice since 1988. It only took one winter in the north-east US to figure out the cost of ‘natural gas bills’.
Environment, Pocket-book, Slight Inconvenience, and large/thick clothes……This was our reason to buy those wooden racks, create more moisture in the home in winter in the house (drying clothes in house in winter = more moisture naturally). We do it in the summer also, but we do it out on the deck with a clothes line.
It has saved approx $25 per month of gas bills x 20 years x Interest = $6000 This along with other things have allowed us to pay off our house at age 41, and with an even bigger home purchase, just did that in cash also.
Its ALL ABOUT CHOICES of where to SPEND MONEY, and choosing not to live on someone elses (Bank or CC) money. Being a student of math and finance, I understand leverage, but that stuff is good for business, not for personal life.
These are good choices for all young people to learn. Please do the best you wish, but ‘think and choose wisely’.
Kenny
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