How to line dry your clothes in the sunshine instead of the dryer and save energy. A typical clothes dryer uses 4000 Watts of power when on. Multiply that by the number of hours to figure how much electricity that is. Running a typical dryer for one hour uses 4 kilowatt hours of energy, running it for 30 minutes uses 2 kilowatt hours. In our eight-person house, we estimate we’re saving about 12 hours per month of running a dryer, or about 48 kilowatt hours.
That may not amount to much in terms of dollars saved, but consider the enormous aggregate energy savings if millions of Californians and others who live in sunny climates switched to line-drying from electric dryers.
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I’ll happily line dry when the weather is nice, and it’s well known how much I love Box of Rain. That said, how much money does one dryer load really cost? If it’s true that a dryer takes 4,000 W, how much does it cost to turn that on for 30-40 minutes? I’d love to see a source or some figures, because especially up here in rainy Seattle there are lots of days when I’d rather pay a couple dollars for some dry warm clothes than wait to do my laundry on the one dry day each week.
It’s true that one house doesn’t save a whole lot of money with this. In sunny California, at Palo Alto Green’s cheap (and renewable) energy rates, we calculated that we save only $7 per month by line drying instead of electric drying. The real purpose of pushing line-drying is to encourage mass behavior-change — to get people who can line-dry to do so (obviously not in a rainy Seattle winter). In aggregate, that could save tons of energy and money — especially for folks in sunny climes like Southern California.
Cool site and video! I would add that I love the fresh smell of line dried clothing…
Look forward to future posts..
props to Rob Levitsky for developing the pulley system at Box and his other houses.