I’m not converse with the details of California’s energy problems (supply vs demand?) but if the authorities have any laws, guidelines or at least incentives for reducing consumption, wouldn’t reducing clothes dryer use be a fairly easy one to implement?
From the point of view of the consumer, environmental concerns aside, isn’t the idea of much lower electricity bills an incentive?
the difference in attitude between the US and Europe/Australia on this is pretty amazing.
In the UK and Australia people would look down on you as being a lazy slob if you used a clothes drier on a warm summer day. Hanging on lines or indoor clothes racks is the normal default, even in winter.
Yep, the good old Hills Hoist is a part of growing up in Australia. We had one in our back yard, and so did almost everyone we knew. We never had a clothes dryer at all. My parents still dry all their clothes on a clothesline, and i think that clothese dried in the sun and the wind have a much fresher smell and feel. I wonder whether they might also last longer, not being tossed around in a hot dryer after every wash.
While i understand that clothes dryers are convenient if you need to dry something quickly, and necessary if you live in a very cold and/or wet climate, the idea that municipalities would actually ban outdoor clotheslines strikes me as one of the most incredibly narrow-minded and stupid things i’ve ever heard of.
The only problem i ever had with clotheslines in Australia was that occasionally, especially if you left your clothes out overnight, orb-weaving spiders would take advantage of the hanging laundry and string their webs between your t-shirts and underwear. I remember once retrieving my laundry and placing the basket in my bedroom, only to come back later find that i had brought in a large orb-weaver, which had then strung a web between my bed and the clothes basket.
In the past several years, we’ve spent time in Dubai, Prague and Nevada. In all places we try to use the drying rack as much as possible, but in the winter in Prague we normally use the dryer.
Well, what about Canada? Seems like they always get a pass from the “dumb Americans, smart Europeans and rest of the world” posts, even when the cultural practice in question duplicates the US. I never saw laundry hanging on lines in Southern Ontario to a greater extent than in upstate NY.
Yes, everyone in Southern CA has a dryer.
I was a kid in Bakersfield, and my mom has always been a fanatic clothesline dryer. But even she has a dryer, she just doesn’t use it much. Way back when, the washer and dryer lived on our back porch.
I have a clothesline, and so do some of my neighbors, so I guess I live in a somewhat common-sensical city.
After sojourning in Europe a couple of years ago I was loudly heard to state “that these little nations will never rise above Third World status until they learn to acquire and make proper use of quality clothes dryers :p.”
Tongue in cheek, obviously. But yes, the cultural gap on this one is surprisingly wide. One of those weird little differences that you never think of until it sneaks up on you. One part of it is that as noted in many parts of the U.S. it is regarded as “unsightly” and “low-class.” In my case it is a combination of the extreme convenience and loathing the scratchy/stiff feel of line-dryed clothes. Really minor issues, but there you go. I wouldn’t live in a house/apatment that lacked one - it’s an absolute, deal-breaking requirement.
Clothes dryers are omnipresent in CA north and south and even here in Liberal Hippietown, USA ( i.e. Berkeley, CA ) you won’t see many clothes lines. When you do they are almost invariably the domain of “hippies” ( very loosely defined 
) and first generation ethnic minorities.
I think you vastly over estimate the cost of running the clothes dryer. The laundromat can make money at $1 a load to dry. So i probably costs the homeowner 75 cents or less.
http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/home/appliances/dryers.html
$85 a year is not a lot of money. I gladly pay that for the convenience of using a dryer vs hanging the laundry to dry. I remember helping my mom hang clothes out to dry it took us 10 to 15 minutes extra per load to hang the clothes and take them down vs the 1 minute to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer.
In much of southern California, the land needed for a clothesline would cost more than years of running a dryer.
You wouldn’t just be considered lazy. Nowadays you’d also be thought environmentally unsound and lacking in green credibility.
It is an interesting cultural difference. When I bought my current place I told the agent not to bother showing me anything that didn’t have a clothes line, or room for one.
Most people in the US have a dryer, yes. I’ve thought about getting a line, but it’s kind of an eco-warrior/white trash thing to do, you know? Plus, we have trees.
30 to 40 cents, according to the cite I linked below.
With some reason. This site quotes DOE statistics from 2001 showing that clothes dryers account for about 5.8% of all residential energy use in the US. (And that doesn’t even take into consideration the people who use clothes dryers in laundromats instead of in the home.)
That’s quite a bit of energy just for the purpose of (a) drying items in about 1 hour instead of about 3-6 hours; (b) saving about 10 minutes extra work per load of laundry; (c) avoiding the “crisp” feeling of line-dried fabric (which, as redtail23 noted, can be eliminated just by fluffing dry clothes in the dryer for a few minutes).
You don’t necessarily need outdoor space for line drying. I have a retractable clothesline and a drying rack set up in a closed-in sun porch, and they handle everything up to and including household linens.
Yes, it’s entirely a matter of perception. Back before clothes dryers became ubiquitous, there was nothing “low class” about having the week’s wash out on the line.
I can see how if one person is doing more than 3 loads or so of laundry per week, it would be worth it to own and run a clothes dryer. For someone averaging a load of laundry every 10-12 days or so, however, I can’t imagine why that would seem like a good idea. Those machines cost six hundred bucks or thereabouts, there’s no way I’m going to spend that kind of money to save ten minutes a week in doing a task that a $15 clothesline accomplishes just as well.
It’s worth it!!!
Stupid hippies.
If you’re line-drying for the energy benefits, I don’t think you come out very well by hanging them inside in the winter. Evaporation requires heat, and the heat in your house is provided by your furnace. It’s probably a bit more efficient than a dryer, but I wouldn’t assume it’s a lot more.
How much is your time worth? Mine is worth far more than the $1.80-$2.40/hour I’d be saving by hanging clothes on a clothesline. Given that minimum wage is 3 times that amount, I’d guess that just about everybody’s time is worth more than that. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t line dry clothes if you like it, or if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy for saving the planet (I ride my bike to the grocery store for that very reason, and for the exercise), but the economic argument is pretty weak.
I always wondered, when I was living in Florida (where people do have clothes dryers, although it’s important to remember that the rainy season isn’t so much “rainy” as “drenched”), how come that so many Americans have that idea - yet ads for fabric softener do show clothes drying on a line.
I still don’t get it.
And by the way, through which mechanism are the clothes supposed to be getting stiff? Do people with this belief think that clothes need to be “softened” by the movement of the dyer?
With time increments as small as the ones I’m considering, I don’t think I’d be garnering any very impressive savings with a clothes dryer via the “my time is too valuable” argument.
Even if my time is worth $30/hour, if I save ten minutes in ten days by not line-drying a load of laundry, I’ve saved only fifty cents a day or about $185 per year. Compare that to the several hundred dollars I’d spend on buying the dryer in the first place and the $15 or so I’d spend annually to run it at that infrequent rate, and it would still take me over three years to break even—and of course, that assumes zero maintenance costs for the dryer. A low-wage worker earning one-quarter of that hypothetical $30/hour wage would take four times as long, or 12 years, for the savings in time to be worth the expense of buying and running the dryer.
And, of course, that calculation depends on the highly dubious assumption that I should estimate the monetary value of all my time as equal to the value of my time during my working day. Actually, of course, I’m not earning $30/hour or whatever during every waking moment, so a ten-minute interval every ten days spent hanging up the laundry is extremely unlikely to be having any genuine impact on my earning potential.
If it’s reasonable to put a monetary value on the ten minutes of puttering time spent hanging up the laundry by treating it as lost earnings potential, it seems equally reasonable to put a monetary value on the warm and fuzzy feeling derived from hanging up the laundry. Let’s see, if that good feeling amounts to about half of the effect of a $2 antidepressant, I’ve saved a whole dollar right there! Wow!
Attempting to monetize even the most minor aspects of one’s lifestyle choices seems rather dumb to me. I don’t really believe I’m losing ten minutes’ worth of my wages every time I hang up the laundry, nor do I believe that the good feeling it gives me is actually saving me a quantifiable amount of medical expenses.
Growing up in Southern California we had a clothes dryer, but my mother would hang clothes in our back yard most of the year. Never seemed to be any problems minus the occasional bug or bird doo-doo.
I’d like to offer some defense or explanation, but I can’t, other than it just seems to me like that’s how it would happen. It’s especially silly because a moment’s thought points me at my bath towels, which dry perfectly well hanging on a hook.
The other thing to remember An Gadaí is that American clothes dryers actually dry your clothes, and in a pretty short time. They’re not like these miserable Irish/British ones that spend hours and hours guzzling up energy only to get your clothes from wet to moderately damp.