I need your help, my friends. I need you to start hanging your laundry outside. There are lots and lots and lots of reasons you should do this, and I'm going to give them to you, right now.
1: Hanging laundry outside is much better for the environment. The average American household dries 24 loads of laundry per month. The average dryer uses about 4000 watts per hour. On contrast, your refrigerator only uses about 1000 watts per hour. And I think we can all agree that food is more important than dried clothes, yes?
2: Hanging your clothes to dry will save you a nice chunk on your electric bill. When we were in Texas, our electricity was 11 cents per kilowatt hour, so drying a load of laundry would have cost us approximately 44 cents. With a family of six and a minimalist wardrobe, we still do about six loads a week, which means that we would have spent about $12 a month on electricity, just for our dryer. Here in Nevada, the price per kilowatt hour is higher.
3: Your clothes will never smell as fresh or be as nicely pressed as when you dry them on a clothesline or drying rack. Give it a try! Yes, the slight crunchiness of them takes a little getting used to. But you will, and eventually it won't bother you anymore, and you will love the fresh sunshiney-ness of them.
4: Drying clothes on a line or rack will lengthen their lives, too. You know that sweater that you loved to pieces and eventually wore out? Or those pants that were sooooo comfy and made your bum look spectacular, but had to throw out because they got all pilly? Drying them on the line will help prevent stuff like that. Pills on your clothes come from friction, which happens when your favorite pants are tossed up against your sweaters, towels, and underwear IN THE DRYER. It won't happen on the clothesline!
5: But the most important reason to dry your clothes on the line is to normalize it. I'm dead serious. I read just the other day about a homeowners' association that put "no clotheslines" in their bylaws. I was in the laundry room with a woman last summer in Ohio, and when I mentioned that I was planning to wash my clothes and then hang them out to dry, she said,
"My husband won't let me do that. He says he doesn't want to live like gypsies." I absolutely guarantee that the racism of that statement is far more hideous and appalling than the sight of a family's laundry wafting in the breeze.
We've had RV parks say specifically in their rules "No clotheslines; no drying racks." Apparently clothes hanging outside are horribly ugly? When did that become a thing?
Keep in mind that I am not talking about showing your underoos to the world. Any experienced clotheslineologist (that's a new word I made up; tell your friends) can show you ten different ways to camouflage or hide your unmentionables. Yesterday I simply made a little shield out of my gorgeous, colorful Turkish towels and put underwear on the inside of my drying rack. You can even buy little hanger things with clips on them, and hang bras and underwear in the shower.
FYI: never ever ever put a bra in the dryer, friends. Just don't do it, especially not if it has an underwire. That's not me being preachy. It's science.
Clothes blowing in the breeze are BEAUTIFUL. They are downright wholesome! Want to please your grandmother, who probably grew up during the Great Depression and couldn't fathom paying for something that the sun and air will do for free? Hang up your clothes.
If our climate is changing, and it certainly appears to be, one of the best things we can all do is reduce the amount of energy that we use. Hanging your laundry on a line is SO easy, so cheap, and so much better for your clothes! And if everyone does it, more RV parks will start allowing it. Help me out, friends!
No comments:
Post a Comment