Line Drying our Laundry
We didn’t have a dryer in Germany. All of our clothes dried on this rack from OBI for about 20 euros.
It filled a big chunk of our living room every time we set it up.
Then our laundry took over 24 hours to dry on wet winter days. Nobody gave us funny looks; line drying clothes was the norm.
Now we live in the Rocky Mountains (where there isn’t intense humidity) in the heat of the summer. A lot of our neighbors are using dryers. But not us. The dryer here is just collecting dust because living in Germany reintroduced us to the laundry habits our mothers and grandmothers were doing for years. I love it! Here’s why:
1. We save money. Dryers suck up more energy than almost anything else in the house when they run. There’s also the added expense of buying a dryer.
2. The temperatures are perfect for line drying right now. It’s summer. Running a hot dryer doesn’t sound too appealing in our already hot house.
3. We generate less laundry. Line drying clothes takes a little more time to set up each time, so we get a little more wear out of things before they go in the laundry (especially in the winter!). Here are some laundry tips we’ve found. We find our towels especially don’t need to be washed quite so often.
4. Our clothes last longer. Remember our family’s No New Clothes Challenge? We’re not buying new clothes. We’re using what we have, which means we’re doing what we can to make them last. Dryers weaken fabrics over time. All that lint in our dryers is particles of fabric getting prematurely warn from our clothes. In our dryer days, our biggest problem was worn heels in our socks. Not any more.
Sadly, a lot of home owner associations ban lines for drying laundry outside. And if you’re like us, clothes can’t be hanging out in the breeze due to allergies. That doesn’t mean you can’t still line dry clothes. Hang them in your house. Build a rack in the basement or garage. Set up a rack in the laundry room (Amazon has a good selection
How do you dry your clothes? What are the benefits you love about the system you have or what would you change?
July 19th, 2010 at 10:01 am
I am with you on avoiding using the dryer. Since we do have one, I use it for the towels, sheets and jeans. I usually run one dryer load per five or six washer loads. I am lucky to have a (very small) laundry room attached to a (small) spare bathroom in the basement. Even though there’s not a lot of space, it is enough for hanging and setting out wet laundry to dry without getting in the way or cluttering up the living space we use. Plus, the laundry room is also the boiler room, so it is always warm and the laundry dries pretty quickly! I would love to hang the sheets outdoors to dry, but we don’t have a convenient location for an outdoor clothesline.
July 19th, 2010 at 10:55 am
We have a dryer, but we don’t dry everything in it. We do use it more than we should… I need to think about getting another drying rack, especially as we’ll be installing a wood stove soon and clothes would LOVE that heat!
Our good clothes (mostly work stuff) don’t go in the dryer. Both DH & I hate when our clothes shrink, plus, as you mentioned, clothes do last longer when you un-dry them. Our work stuff isn’t pricey, but I don’t enjoy spending money unnecessarily.
We have a drying rack which holds ~12 larger items (shirts/pants) and we also put clothes on hangers to dry. We then put those clothes into our spare bathroom which doesn’t yet have a shower curtain, so the curtain rod is where the clothes hang!
BTW, do you have planes on the brain? I see you used “hangar” for the things you put clothes on ;-)
July 19th, 2010 at 11:01 am
I said “hangar”? haha!
Thanks Rabbit …it’s corrected.
July 19th, 2010 at 11:25 am
Our washer has a super cool feature — an extra spin cycle! I use it all the time and hang out most of our laundry in our laundry room. We’ve also got a dryer, which we use for sheets and towels. I’m in the damp Netherlands; if we don’t dry our towels in the dryer, they start to smell musty. Anyone have a solution for that? I’d line dry towels (in my laundry room) if they didn’t get musty.
July 19th, 2010 at 11:27 am
We have never even considered a dryer, even with two small children creating a monumental amount of washing. As we are very lucky to have a garden most of our stuff is put outside. Not sure how I would manage if drying clothes outside was not allowed. It’s very typical in the UK for washing to be dried outside.
July 19th, 2010 at 11:57 am
Hey Katie! I’ve been traveling for a few weeks, but I’m back :) I live in an apartment (in Denver! are you anywhere nearby?) and we are ‘not allowed’ to dry our laundry outside. Sometimes I dry it outside anyway on a rack because it’s so much faster, and other times I’ll hang the rack inside. My husband is not quite no board yet and he thinks it’s weird to air-dry things when we have a dryer, so when he does laundry he uses the dryer. I’d like to get another rack though, so that I can dry everything at once (I do laundry when I have a full load, but I only have one drying rack). I also do the hanging-shirts-on-hangers-to-dry trick. For things that are wrinkled but shouldn’t be, I’ll pop them in the dryer for about 5 minutes when they’re almost dry. That usually works well.
July 19th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Bethany – we run into that problem in the winter in Berlin. So we put the drying rack right next to the heater with jeans and towels closest to the heat. Hanging them in the sun also works… when you have sun! When we have winter guests, we have to hang towels on the bathroom heater on low and switch them every so often so all the towels in the bathroom are dry and musky smell-free.
*I imagine your heaters are the same hot water heaters we have in Germany. I sure wouldn’t recommend the same techniques with some American heating systems.
Hope that helps you. Nothing yuckier than a musky towel!
Katie
July 19th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Bashtree – Welcome back! Sadly (or fortunately – however you look at it!), we’re not reasonably around Denver. Perhaps one day again!
Katie
July 19th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
hello there,
as a German I was used to dry the laundry just as you described. In fact, it was *mymosthated* chore throughout my teenage years *lol*
Who would have ever thought, that I would miss it one day…or even live somewhere where hanging laundry outside is a no no *gofigure*
I have posted twice on my blog about my love for hang drying clothes, esp. since one of my favorite blogs was holding something called “wash wednesdays” where people submit pictures of their laundry hanging outside. You can find my post here http://jaramos.blogspot.com/2010/06/wash-wednesdays.html
I totally agree with you on all points. It took me some growing up, but now I LOVE dry hanging clothes :o)
Greetings from the West Coast,
Angela
July 19th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
I must have lived all my life in odd pockets of various countries. I have always line dried clothing and it has always been the norm. Until early adult I was in the US midwest. Even in the snowy winter my mom used to put out the towels to sort of freeze dry I guess. You know those bright crisp snow covered days. Later, various European countries but always clotheslines outside in good weather and inside otherwise. In all those homes the lines were already there when we moved in. So now I keep reading how different this seems to be??
July 19th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Line drying is definitely gaining ground up here in Vancouver – as long as it’s not visible from the street, I believe. I wonder about installing one of those retractable drying lines sometimes seen in hotel showers?
July 19th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
I try to hang my clothes as much as possible. Outside in the summer and in the basement in the winter. In the past I have been lazy and tended to put things like socks and underwear in the dryer. I recently bought a drying rack and started using it for small items. I wrote a long post on my blog about hanging laundry last year.
http://carriescaprice.blogspot.com/2009/06/art-of-hanging-laundry.html
July 19th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
I’m English, so I’ve always line dried my clothes too. Even with 3 children who were all in washable nappies (only 2 at any one time though!). Tumble driers are creeping in and becoming more of a ‘must-have’ in the UK, but it’s still a matter of pride to have your clean washing out on the line :-)
We have a collection of airers and have discovered towels dry well over the bannister or over an airer upstairs- must be all the warm air rising- if it’s wet outside. It is possible to do it without making your house look like a public laundry!
July 19th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
When I was renovating my house last year, I was able to convert the room on the west corner of the house into the laundry room. We hang everything indoors in that room, with the afternoon sun beating down through the open windows. The room gets so hot that it would have been useless as anything else anyway (we live in the Philippines). We have a dryer but that is used only for sheets and towels, all our other clothes (even if handwashed) goes through a spin cycle before hanging. Oh, I also have gas-powered dryer so it’s much cheaper than one that is plugged in. Electricity costs here are ridiculous.
July 20th, 2010 at 9:33 am
Love my rack that is over 20 years old that I bought in Italy when we lived there for two years. I live in a HOA that prevents clothes lines…but they don’t object about my rack which I set up on the patio every day and dry my towels after we shower and my laundry when I do it…about once a week or two. We don’t have a lot of laundry with just the two of us. I LOVE the way the clothes smell when they hang outside and the fact that we are not wasting energy with the dry is another bonus. I also mounted a hotel towel bar in my bathroom where I hang shirts that need to be hung for drying when it’s raining or too cold outside and sometimes it expands onto my shower curtain pole as well. Whatever it takes to hang dry my clothes, I’m willing to do and my DH is slowly coming around as well. Thanks for sharing and have a wonderful week, fondly, Roberta
July 20th, 2010 at 10:20 am
I have long legs so I’ve pretty much always had to hang dry ALL my pants, or they shrink up and are too short. I find the same thing with cotton shirts… and midriff-baring shirts are not a good look for me. :) So I end up hanging up pretty much everything that I wear outside the house. :) My husband has a lot of quick-dry sports clothes that are also better to be hung up than put through the dryer. We have one of those racks still from Italy but I don’t use it very much. We bought front-load washer & dryer when we bought this house and we have them stacked, so that half of our laundry closet is empty, and we put in a hanging rack in the empty half. I also hang up clothes across the shower curtain rod in the guest bathroom. :)
July 20th, 2010 at 10:32 am
When I visited Hong Kong I saw laundry hanging out of many of the windows of high-rise apartment buildings. My friend told me that few people in Hong Kong have clothes dryers, though she herself never hung her clothes out the window because of all the air pollution!
July 20th, 2010 at 11:01 am
HURRAY for line drying! Haha, sounds stupid but nice to see so many people, especially in North America are PRO! I am a Canandian who has been living in Barcelona for the past 6 years and using a dryer here is unimaginable for both price and space constraints! It is really practical and easy to line dry when I go home and see some of my family memebers putting everything in the dryer even in the summer it drivers me bonkers!
July 20th, 2010 at 11:07 am
Good to know that Roberta! Her HOA bans clothes lines…. but no one is protesting her drying rack on the patio! I love that.
Katie
July 22nd, 2010 at 10:22 am
I am with you on the line drying. I bought a rack similar to yours from Ikea several years ago and use it for everything! I even convinced 2 people to buy one last time I was at Ikea.
I got used to it living in France and the UK and didn’t have a dryer in either place. With a little extra planning, I think my clothes come out looking nicer and smelling better, without wasting electricity. Plus, you don’t have the possibility of things shrinking into nothingness.
My mom also doesn’t dry anything anymore. Soon after I came back from the UK, her dryer broke. Instead of spending the money to fix it, I told her to go out and buy a rack. She’s never bought a new dryer and doesn’t miss it at all!
July 24th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
I love the idea of line drying in theory, but in practice…..well, we live in a really humid climate where anything moist turns green outside, and not in a good way, if you know what I mean. And we have deed restrictions that don’t allow a permanent clothes line – so it would have to be retracted/hidden after every use. And frankly, between the heat-stroke inducing weather and hot flashes, I’m ok with that.
When we moved to our current house, I had the builder delete their usual shelf and folding surface and got some Elfa at Container Store (on sale, of course!), and included 3 hanging rods (2 short and 1 long hanging area). Those, plus the free standing and wall-mounted drying racks I brought with me from the last place, allow me to air dry many things so easily! Deleting the folding surface means I can keep my ironing board up so it isn’t a big deal to iron things, especially if I give some items a slight tumble before hanging. Other things never go in the dryer at all. occasionally, I put a small oscillating table fan on the ironing board to create a gentle breeze for the hanging space, and put the free-standing racks under a ceiling fan. Depends on the weather and whether or not I really need something to get dry quickly…in this climate, nothing dries quickly, unlike in the Rocky Mountains!
I’m still using more electricity than outdoor line-drying, but I’m extending the life of my clothing.
July 30th, 2010 at 5:30 am
I am looking for something to hang over my banister to dry sheets – bit like the plastic ones you can get to put over radiator but an extra long one and one that will fit over the banister which is obviously wider than a radiator. One with maybe 2 rails so I could have 2/3 sheets at the same time. Any suggestions would be gratefully received. Thanks
July 30th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Would two lines work, Jules? You can get clothes lines that are retractable so you only have them out when needed.
December 9th, 2011 at 2:06 pm
We stopped using a dryer about four years ago when ours broke and we couldn’t afford to buy another one. The dryer that we had was a European model, so it was already more energy efficient than your average American dryer. Still, it was an energy hog, as we saw from our bill after not using the dryer for a month. Amazingly, I quickly adapted to drying clothes outside on the line or inside on a rack. Hanging clothes outside in the summer gives them a nice smell and the sun kills bacteria. I even hang my clothes outside on the line in the winter (today they’re hanging out in 26 degree weather). A common misconception is that you need heat to dry clothes. You don’t. Just air, and it can be cold air. Sometimes I hang clothes indoors on a rack and put it over a heating vent if I need to dry my clothes faster. It only takes a couple of hours for clothes to dry that way. We’ve saved tons of money by line and rack drying clothes.