Very interesting. We have a little courtyard home on this street and it is fully enclosed by a solid fence taller than me. I can’t look into anyone else’s yard and they can’t see into mine.
I had the impression from things I’d read in gun discussions that Americans are more obsessed with home security than some other cultures and had expected the physical barriers to be stronger.
No, most of the neighborhoods I know in the US do not have fences or walls around the yards like they have everywhere here in Australia. I think it’s different in the South, but I’m from NY and I would say that walls are only common among more urban, brownstone or townhouse-style houses. So just because you put your laundry in the backyard does not mean that no one can get to it or see it.
But that being said, I think the main reason people don’t do it as much is like everyone’s said - because there’s a cultural perception that it looks shabby. Actually, everyone in the neighborhood where I grew up hung laundry out to dry - my mom even had one of those Hills Hoist style things. But then when she was done, she put the contraption away, which I don’t really see people doing here in Australia. So maybe it’s partly a misconception that people line dry less because they don’t leave the equipment out all the time, which is probably because a) with the open backyards, people can see it and b) with the snow, it has to be easy to remove and put back. We also hung laundry in the basement to dry, so that’s not as visible either.
Not saying people don’t line dry more frequently here in Australia, because they certainly seem to, just suggesting some other reasons why it might be less visible in the US.
Your concept of “fine” is probably different from mine. I’ve never encountered an “ordinary” dryer on this side of the pond that I thought worked well. The other transplanted Yanks that I know say the same. The topic regularly appears in bitch sessions on the expat forums I read.
It is, of course, possible to get a US-style dryer here, and I know a couple people who have done so, but they’re particularly expensive.
Who says they don’t? But ice evaporates too, just damn slowly. Notice that by the time you hang your clothes, they aren’t anywhere near drenched (you always have the option of running an extra spin cycle).
I’ve never had a clothes dryer and always line dried my clothes. They don’t end up stiff or crunchy; I think that’s because they are spin-dried in the washing machine, so they’re just damp rather than sopping wet when they are hung up.
Actually you just reminded me - one of our neighbors did put up a fence at one point when I was a kid, the tall kind that you see around here in Australia, and it was such an unusual thing and seemed so unfriendly that we started calling her “the witch lady!” When I first got here I looked around at all the fences and said “Doesn’t anyone like their neighbors?” and my Aussie partner said, “Well, it’s nice to have privacy when you’re in your yard.” So it’s definitely a cultural difference. Although I believe that in parts of the US (the South) walls around yards are much more common.
One difference my mother noticed when she visited my aunt in Arizona was that when she went to hang out clothes on the line, she didn’t have to take a damp cloth to clean the line first. We just couldn’t imagine such in Tennessee! No wonder the air is so much better for people with allergies there!
(This was in the early 1980s and my aunt was 100. She was apparently the last of a dying breed of clothesline users in Arizona!)
My mother is 96 and lives in assisted living. She wound up her clothesline and took it with her out of pure sentimental value. Oh, man! Sleepin’ on sheets dried in the fresh country air!
What do you mean by “US-style”? Do you mean a vented dryer as opposed to the condenser dryers (the latter of which are unaccountably popular in the UK, and I agree are rubbish)?
I have a fairly cheap vented tumble dryer which sits in my garage, vented to outside, and it gets a full load of laundry perfectly dry in no more than an hour. Do they really need to be any quicker than that?
All right, so maybe they’re not so expensive. (I’ve never actually looked for one myself but have heard people talk about “shelling out” for them.) Anyway, they do seem unusual over here - the crappy washer/dryer combo seems to be the default.
An hour seems like a bit too long to me. I don’t time my dryer cycles or anything, but generally I figure that a dryer load will take a little longer than a wash load, which is about 20 minutes. So, a little more than half an hour? Unless it’s jeans? (Don’t tell my mom that I ever put jeans into a dryer.)
Quicker = less energy = cheaper, right?
That always weirds me out when people talk about it - yes, in the South the norm is fenced back yards, but never front yards unless you live in the ghetto. It looks incredibly strange to me to see those houses sitting there on land with no fences anywhere around - where do the dogs crap?
I’ve lived in several different parts of the US and I’ve never had a backyard without a fence. It would seem… I don’t know … odd.
On the neighbours lawn if they’re well trained.
In the Netherlands, rainy though it is, I guess about 70 % of people line-dry, and 30 % use a dryer. Most people line-dry indoors, or under a lean to.
I didn’t say they wouldn’t get dry. I said that the energy gains might not be much, since evaporation is endothermic, and you’re paying money to heat your house.
I think my unfamiliarity with basements might have led me astray, though. Do basements generally receive heat from the house heating system, or are they pretty much at earth-temperature all the time? If the latter, then you’d still save money.
I lived in Southern Spain and I could go on for years about the disadvantages of line-drying.
I think dryers are better in all ways except for cost. But it’s totally worth it!