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.