The Loneliest Appliance

We have a very lonely appliance in our house, it really doesn't see much use any more other than for the odd emergency and as a nice flat place to set things.  It has been relegated to the same useful level as the iron and the hair dryer - almost completely unnecessary.  Instead, it has been replaced by string....well, clothesline, to be more exact, and clothespins. The dryer has been laid off and is looking at permanent unemployment.

I originally set out trying to figure out just how much energy and money  this might save us - it isn't too tough of an equation really (how many kilowatts a drier uses) x (price per kilowatt hour) x (number of hours of use per week), in other words, information that can be readily found on the manual and electric bill.  But then it came to me that it doesn't really matter if it saves me 5 cents or $500, it is simply the right thing to do.  Convenient? - no, not really.  Good for the world in general?- Absolutely!  Last I checked, sunlight and air were both free, and any coal that I can save from being mined, hauled and burned for my mere convenience....so much the better.   It does definitely take more time to hang out clothes and it can get to be a little dicey when it is cold outside, but even below freezing, hanging clothes out to dry works.

I have heard any number of stories for why people don't want to hang out clothes. My favorites are the stories I hear from people that live in a housing development that won't allow clothes lines because they are unsightly.  Unsightly!  Clean clothes, bedding, towels and yes....God forbid.....underwear!  Seriously, have we become so prudish that we don't like the sight of clothes that everyone wears?  Or is it that we are so focused on appearances that we wouldn't want our neighbors to know that we actually have to wash our clothes rather than just constantly buying new?   Personally, I love seeing clothes on the line.  It shows a certain amount of dedication, thriftiness, cleanliness and care.  The other day, while driving around the Amish farms, I saw a place where they had rigged up a pulley line that stretched from the house to the silo - that clothes was flapping in the breeze 20 feet in the air!

Hanging clothes out can also be a rather meditative task.  It doesn't take a lot of skill - although if you have to fit three loads of laundry on a line that typically can only hold two, it takes a little planning.  I find myself talking with the cats that come to see what I am doing, or planning what to plant in my flower beds, or watching deer cross the field north of our house, or watching the birds chirp and flit around and, before I realize it, all the clothes are hung up and drying nicely in the sun.

"But", you say,.... and I totally get this because I have a hard time with this also..."it is just so convenient to go from the washer to the dryer - I mean, they are right there next to each other!  Hanging them out will involve a basket, clothes pins and hauling them to the line and then hanging them up and then taking them down again.....ugh!"  I know, it can seem like just too much.  This is where I invoke Nike's ad campaign...."Just do it!"  The hardest part of any job is starting it.  Once the ball is rolling, it is really very easy and surprisingly enjoyable.  I often realize that my family is one in about 100 that actually hang clothes out, but I like to imagine a day when it becomes the standard rather than the exception, and when you think about it, it was the standard less than 70 years ago.  That was the way that clothes got dry....period!  In fact, I still have some clothes pins that were my grandmother's and I will often think of her when I reach into the bag and pull out one of the pink ones that she used to have and it is something of a comfort, in a weird way, that we are sharing some of life's tasks - I try to imagine what the world was like when she was hanging out her clothes - that alone makes the time fly.

The other thing that people will say is, "I just don't have the room for a clothes line."  They live in an apartment, or have some other living arrangement that inhibits them from having a line, and to this I say, "Be creative"  I really don't like hanging clothes up outside when it is frigid - I like my fingers too much to freeze them off.  So, in order to appease the clothesline god of the house (my husband) and save my fingers, I rigged up a clothesline in the basement of the house.  I tied up a few stray pieces of line between the stairs and my treadmill (those things can be good for more than just running) and viola' - dry clothes and no frozen fingers.  It also worked out well that the wood burning stove is in the basement, so the warm air being given off by that helped to dry the clothes in record time.  The point of it is, clotheslines don't need to take up a lot of room and they can be taken down easily.  There are also wooden clothes drying racks that dry an amazing amount of clothes in a very small space - these are especially handy for socks and undies...or in the case of my kids playing outside in the winter....mittens.

Just out of curiosity, I did run some numbers to see what it costs us to dry our clothes. The US has roughly 115,000,000 households that all have laundry to wash.   Using some average dryer specifications of 5kW per load, and an average energy bill of $0.10/kWh we come up with 5kW x $0.10 x 115,000,000 million households = $57,5000,000 for one load of laundry per household per week. Granted, that isn't really all that much per household, but it does start to add up.

I went a little further and checked into how much coal it takes to produce 1 kWh and there were ranges cited from 0.8 pound per kWh to 2.1 pounds per kWh. I averaged the amounts cited and came up with 1.3 pounds of coal per kWh. Assuming that a dryer uses approximately 5 kW, that ends up being about 6.5 pounds of coal for each dryer load of clothes. Now, when you figure in the number of households....we are talking 747,500,000 pounds of coal per week for each household to dry one load of clothes. Even if only 1 out of 10 households dries their clothes per week, we are still talking about 74,750,000 pounds of coal! 

I couldn't even picture that much coal unless it was in a rail car that I see fly by me while stopped at a railroad crossing.  Figuring that rail cars can carry roughly 244,300 pounds of coal (and that was the largest capacity I could find) - that is roughly 305 railroad cars full of coal for one tenth of the households just to dry their clothes once weekly.  Please, someone tell me I figured these numbers wrong, because that is really kind of disturbing.  Now, when I see a coal trains, I think of it more in the number of dryer loads.....dryer loads that could be free - free of energy cost and pollution.

 It is hard, sometimes, to feel like we make any difference at all just being one person trying to do something good for the environment, but if we all do small things and we all encourage others to do small things....it starts to make a difference.  And maybe, if we are very lucky, there will be housing developments eventually that won't allow dryers and will insist upon there being only clothes lines instead.