I've never owned a regular clothes dryer; I've always dried my clothes on a line in the summer and on drying racks in winter; it works well enough for me (sheets are harder to dry in winter, though) and has saved me many hundreds of dollars in electricity costs over the years.

There wasn't a good place in the yard of our new home to put in a regular clothesline, so I decided to get a good umbrella-style dryer. The one I found is called the Lady Plus, it's made in Switzerland by Stewi, and I love it. What's especially nice is that when you're not using it, it folds right up just like an umbrella:



When it's pulled open, it can hold at least two full loads of laundry, including sheets. It rotates, so you can stand in one place and spin it around to fill up the lines (and when the breeze blows it spins as well)



This thing wasn't cheap ($250 Canadian), but that's still cheaper than a new energy-efficient electric dryer, and there are no electricity costs. The only pain was that I had to dig and pour a concrete footing for it, but that took about 20 minutes. I'm happy!

Cool. I want something like that. I do about 1/2 and 1/2 of machine/line dry for my clothes. There are some things I just want machine dried for the softness but i like line drying to save money.

I wish I could line dry. Our association would never allow it and with a two year old and the way our house is set up racks would be a hazard.

Yeah, I've encountered that issue of line-drying being forbidden by neighborhood or condo rules, which I think is a shame. I suppose some people think seeing laundry drying on a line is tacky or gives a blue-collar air to the neighborhood, but I like blue-collar neighborhoods! Everyone where I live has a clothesline, although they probably use a dryer in winter and in fact we may have to break down and buy one ourselves this winter as there's no good place in the house to put racks either.

The same online store that sells the Lady Plus outdoor dryer also sells drying racks that attach to your ceiling; you can lower them with a pulley and put the clothes on them and then pull them back up again to dry near the ceiling. I would be into that except that our ceilings aren't really high enough.

In the UK, many houses in the country have a "pulley" like that for drying your clothes when you come in out of the rain; often it's in the kitchen over the Rayburn stove.