Putting it all on the Line

Choosing to use a clothes line to dry clothes rather than an electric dryer is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint. Besides saving money on electricity and dryer sheets, not using the dryer reduces the amount of heat in your home. Less heat means less use of the air conditioner in the summer months and did I mention the savings on the electric bill? According to the California Energy Commission, a single dryer will cost over $1,500 in operation fees over its life time. That doesn’t include the initial cost to buy the dryer which runs into the hundreds of dollars.

According to electric use calculators, if you wash a single load of clothes on hot water, put that load into the dryer and then iron that load with an electric iron, it costs you about $1.10. If instead you simply washed the clothes in cold water, hung them on the line to dry and become naturally wrinkle free, a single load of laundry would only cost 12 cents.

That’s a big difference. And reducing your energy consumption is simply a wonderfully side effect of your budget laundry choices.

So once you realize the logic of drying clothes on a line, you have a number of choices. You can buy a clothes line from an online store which can cost anywhere from 20 bucks to a couple hundred dollars depending on style and size, or you could buy a line of rope and a bag of clothes pins. This would cost less than ten dollars. Tie the rope between two trees or other points in the yard and pin your wet clothes on the line. Wait for the power of wind energy to do its work and enjoy line dried, fresh smelling, footprint reducing, alternative energy promoting, clean clothes.

Sometimes it isn’t being green and helping the planet recover from the effects of carbon emission and global warming. But sometimes it is. Sometimes being green is just good old fashioned common sense that benefits both the bottom line and the world.

I mean, its not like clothes lines are a new invention. Sometimes being green isn’t about innovation and looking to the future. It can also be about reviving past ways of doing things to change the present.

A rope, a few pins and a clear day. Easy.