Home appliances use massive amounts of energy, which is harmful to both the environment and your wallet. Next to the refrigerator, the clothes dryer is the most energy-guzzling appliance in the home. The electricity used by dryers not only creates greenhouse gas emissions, but it can also raise your energy bill by hundreds of dollars a year. A great way to decrease the energy your household consumes when drying clothes is to go back to using the trusted old-fashioned clothesline.
Clotheslines are completely harmless to the environment and free to use. All you need is a rope or cord and some clothespins, and depending on your climate you can have dry clothes within a few hours or overnight. Sunny days are best, but cloudy and breezy days work well too. In cold or rainy weather, consider line or rack drying inside (if you have sufficient space) or look into an efficient dryer.
Take Action / Next Steps
Ready to start line-drying your clothes? Sign up for the goal on ecomii Action and track your progress.
Check out different indoor and outdoor line dryers .
Look up different kinds of electric dryers to find the most efficient one you can use in your home.
Did you know that many homeowners’ associations across the country ban the use of
clotheslines?
Get more information about the movements attempting to combat this ban at www.laundrylist.org , an organization that conducts the Right to Dry
and Stop the Ban! campaigns.
Did you know the average clothes dryer uses 1,079 kilowatt hours of electricity per
household?
That’s 2,224 pounds of carbon dioxide that is pumped into the atmosphere by each
household dryer.
Did you know that clothes dryers account for a relatively large percentage of
yearly residential carbon dioxide output?
If every household used a clothesline to dry their clothes for
just half the year, there would be a 3.3% decrease of residential carbon dioxide emissions.
